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Environmentalists often recount tales of recent extinctions in the form of an allegory of human moral failings. But such allegories install an instrumental relation to the past's inhabitants, using them to carry moralistic messages. Taking the passenger pigeon as a case in point, I argue for a different, ethical relation to the past's inhabitants that conserves something of the wonder and 'strangeness of the Other.' What Walter Benjamin refers to as the 'redemptive moment' sparks a recognition of the Other that allows us to engage in heartfelt mourning for them, rather than falling into the repetitive self-absorption characteristic of Freudian melancholy. This redemptive moment changes forever our relations to the world around us. ... every image of the past that is not recognised by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. --WALTER BENJAMIN

This article examines how social theory applies to environmental ethics, focusing on how environmental values can be incorporated into a theoretical framework. The author examines the philosophy of Michel Foucault and Jurgen Habermas, and argues that environmental ethics challenges deconstructivism and anthropocentrism, creating a more reflexive sociology.

The power and the promise of deep ecology is seen, by its supporters and detractors alike, to lie in its claims to speak on behalf of a natural world threatened by human excesses. Yet, to speak of trees as trees or nature as something worthy of respect in itself has appeared increasingly difficult in the light of social constructivist accounts of 'nature.' Deep ecology has been loath to take constructivism's insights seriously, retreating into forms of biological objectivism and reductionism. Yet, deep ecology actually has much in common with, and much to gain from, some varieties of constructivism and can add a new dimension to constructivism's own critique of current ideologies.

Ulrich Beck's 'Risk Society' has been seen as a turning point in sociological views of environmental concerns, helping to understand their social impact through using 'environmental risk' as a new concept. Beck has moved toward a broader view of society in his 'Democracy Without Enemies' and 'The Reinvention of Politics'. The side effects of social activity have unforeseen repercussions, and risk comes from human, rather than natural activity. Globalization has gone hand in hand with greater emphasis on the individual. There are gaps in Beck's arguments, which mean that his evidence and conclusions do not always relate to one another. Beck's notion of reflexive modernity has little substance if the environmental crisis is excluded.

The book entitled Terra Nova: Nature and Culture represents the impossibility of separating nature from culture. Its emphasis is on a wider cultural agenda rather than on philosophical or political aspects. With this book, editor David Rothenberg attempts to express a new way of perceiving the looming presence of nature. It successfully provides a multidimensional perspective between theory and existing conditions.

Inspired by recent anti-roads protests in Britain, I attempt to articulate a radical environmental ethos and, at the same time, to produce a cogent moral analysis of the dialectic between environmental destruction and protection. In this analysis, voiced in terms of a spatial metaphoric, an 'ethics of place,' I seek to subvert the hegemony of modernity's formal systematization and codification of values while still conserving something of modernity's critical heritage: to reconstitute ethics in order to counter the current enclosure of the moral field within economistic and legal bureaucratic frameworks and institutions.

I draw critical parallels between Jim Cheney's work and various aspects of modernism, which he ignores or misrepresents. I argue, first, that Cheney's history of ideas is appallingly crude. He amalgamates all past Western philosophical traditions, irrespective of their disparate backgrounds and complex interrelationships, under the single heading, modern. Then he posits a radical epistemological break between a deluded modernism - characterized as foundationalist, essentialist, colonizing, and totalizing - and a contextual postmodernism. He seems unaware both of the complex genealogy of postmodernism and of those aspects of modern traditions that prefigure his own thesis. Second, Cheney's account of primitive peoples is both ethnocentric (though positively so) and inaccurate. Third, Cheney reduces context or place to a concept of bioregionality. In this way, he reinstates a privileged foundationalism which, by his own definitions, makes his philosophy modernist. I develop these criticisms in order to suggest a less restricted contextual approach to environmental values.

Climate change spells the end of tourism, and tourism is just one, and one of the least important, things to be so very near its end. This situation has emerged because of the global dominance of forms of material engagement that completely misunderstand the distribution of agency in the world. Framing the world as just an external human 'resource' diminishes the many forms of agency that elude, transcend, effect, facilitate and subvert human intentions. Even archetypically inanimate objects, such as stones, are actively constitutive of worlds, thoughts, and lives, including human lives, in myriad transformative ways. This lithic agency is illustrated in terms of the attraction that draws some to visit stone circles, and the atmospheres created by, and felt in, such places. This rather different understanding of a 'visitor attraction' and its ontological and ethical implications exposes some of the inadequate presumptions of our dominant form of life and its destructive atmospheric consequences at local and global scales. The paper employs Material Engagement Theory (MET), originating in archaeology and anthropology, as a way to understand the differences between the reductive assumptions of the Anthropocene and the redemptive possibilities of what it terms a neo-lithic ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract The critique of Thinking Ecologically: Environmental Thought, Values and Policy (Morito, 2002) begins by acknowledging the author's efforts--in this book and other work--to develop an environmental ethic based on [...]

Denaturalizing Ecological Politics: Alienation from Rousseau to the Frankfurt School and Beyond by Andrew Biro, University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 2005, xiii + 230 pp., cloth $60.00 (ISBN 08020-8022-7), paper [...]