Ethics and Philosophy Essay Contest
The International Society of Environmental Epidemiology (ISEE) Ethics and Philosophy Committee announced in 2024 a global call for submissions to the Environmental Ethics Essay Contest, open to graduate students and early-career researchers (within five years of receiving their terminal degree).
The contest is administered by the ISEE Ethics and Philosophy Committee. To ensure procedural fairness, all essays undergo blind review and are evaluated according to a rubric developed by members of the Essay Committee.
Call for Submissions
Submissions for 2026 will be announced in the Spring of 2026.
2025 Essay Winners
Shreeraksha Naik
Who has the ethical responsibility to promote sustainable climate actions?Dr. Shreeraksha Naik, is a post-graduate resident at the Centre for Community Medicine at the All India Institute of Medical Sciences, located in New Delhi, India. Her winning essay was in response to the question “Who has the ethical responsibility to promote sustainable climate actions?” Dr. Naik begins her essay highlighting a conversation with a colleague in which she recalls how the past summers have changed and that it rains all the time. She then continues to define responsibility and proposes that human’s mentality needs to change to accept our own actions and then take actions and responsibility to make a difference. Dr. Naik’s essay concludes with some true stories of a five-year old child and an adult who took responsibility and took actions to address improvement of our “wounded planet.”
Elisia White
Mother Earth – It takes a VillageMs. Elisia White, whose home country is Jamaica, is studying Environmental Health Sciences at New York University in the USA. Her winning essay was also in response to the question “Who has the ethical responsibility to promote sustainable climate actions?” Ms. White begins her essay describing how a staircase represents transition from one level to another. Her essay continues to use this staircase metaphor to address the steps of responsibility for promoting climate actions. The first step begins at the individual level, with the second step climbing to the community, followed by the third step up to organizations such as schools, non-profit agencies, and companies. Once that step is reached, Ms. White, continues the metaphor writing that the top step represents government. Each of these steps of the staircase represent how actions advance. Ms. White concludes her essay with a statement about caring about Mother Earth daily, as much as she has cared about us.
We thank both Dr. Naik and Ms. White for participating in the 2025 ISEE Ethics and Philosophy Committee Essay Contest and congratulate them for writing outstanding essays.