Political Nature: Environmentalism and the Interpretation of Western Thought
by John M. Meyer
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Description
Concern over environmental problems is prompting us to reexamine established thinking about society and politics. The challenge is to find a way for the public's concern for the environment to become more integral to social, economic, and political decision making. Two interpretations have dominated Western portrayals of the nature-politics relationship, what John Meyer calls the dualist and the derivative. The dualist account holds that politics--and human culture in general--is completely show more separate from nature. The derivative account views Western political thought as derived from conceptions of nature, whether Aristotelian teleology, the clocklike mechanism of early modern science, or Darwinian selection. Meyer examines the nature-politics relationship in the writings of two of its most pivotal theorists, Aristotle and Thomas Hobbes, and of contemporary environmentalist thinkers. He concludes that we must overcome the limitations of both the dualist and the derivative interpretations if we are to understand the relationship between nature and politics.Human thought and action, says Meyer, should be considered neither superior nor subservient to the nonhuman natural world, but interdependent with it. In the final chapter, he shows how struggles over toxic waste dumps in poor neighborhoods, land use in the American West, and rainforest protection in the Amazon illustrate this relationship and point toward an environmental politics that recognizes the experience of place as central. show lessTags
Member Reviews
This book presents some interesting perspectives, though it was not one of my favorites to read, out of the stack of books I had to buy and read for a graduate political theory course. The focus in this book on policy choices more than just straight environmentalism was great with respect to our class, but this book is pretty dry reading.
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Author Information
4 Works 44 Members
John M. Meyer is Professor in the Department of Politics and a Faculty Member in Environmental Studies and the Environment and Community Graduate Program at Humboldt State University. He is the author of Political Nature: Environmentalism and the Interpretation of Western Thought and the coeditor of The Environmental Politics of Sacrifice (both show more published by the MIT Press). show less
Classifications
- Genres
- Nonfiction, Science & Nature, Politics and Government, Philosophy
- DDC/MDS
- 320.5 — Society, government, & culture Political science Types of Government Political ideologies
- LCC
- JA75.8 .M49 — Political Science Political science (General) Political science (General) Theory. Relations to other subjects
- BISAC
Statistics
- Members
- 19
- Popularity
- 1,335,131
- Reviews
- 1
- Rating
- (4.00)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 5
