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Providing a bold and original rethinking of environmental ethics, Ben Minteer's Refounding Environmental Ethics will help ethicists and their allies resolve critical debates in environmental policy and conservation practice.

Minteer considers the implications of John Dewey's pragmatist philosophy for environmental ethics, politics, and practice. He provides a new and compelling intellectual foundation for the field—one that supports a more activist, collaborative and problem-solving philosophical enterprise.

Combining environmental ethics, democratic theory, philosophical pragmatism, and the environmental social sciences, Minteer makes the case for a more experimental, interdisciplinary, and democratic style of environmental ethics—one that stands as an alternative to the field's historically dominant “nature-centered” outlook.

Minteer also provides examples of his pragmatic approach in action, considering a wide range of application and issues, including invasive species, ecological research, biodiversity loss, protected area management, and conservation under global climate change.

For decades, scholars have warned of an impending global environmental crisis. Yet politicians, particularly in the United States, have consistently shown that they are not taking the threat seriously. Initiatives aimed at protecting the planet are commonly seen as belonging to a category unto themselves-the preserve of scientists and environmental enthusiasts.

In this groundbreaking book, Robert L. Nadeau warns that we have moved menacingly close to a global environmental catastrophe and that to evade this fate we must stop drawing a distinction between issues that are "environmental" or "scientific" and those that reside in the sphere of "real life." Although scientists have attempted to bring ecological concerns to the forefront of global issues, problems are rarely communicated in ways that can be readily understood by those outside the scientific community.

Bringing together perspectives from a variety of disciplines, including economics, politics, biology, and the history of science, The Environmental Endgame articulates the concerns of scientists in a way that they become the real-life, tangible concerns of people around the world. Nadeau asserts that we have entered a new phase of human history that cannot be one of separation and division but must be one of cooperation and mutual goals.

Nadeau demonstrates that our current governmental and financial institutions, based on neoclassical economics, lack the mechanisms for implementing viable solutions to large-scale crises. Such steps cannot be taken without moving beyond the power politics of the nation-state system. The book concludes with a call to view the natural world as part of humanity, not separate from it. This unifying worldview would be a catalyst for implementing the international government organizations necessary to resolving the crisis.

The Environmental Endgame is an ambitious and timely book that will change the way we think about our economy, our government, and the environment. It should be read by everyone who cares about the pervasive neglect and abuse of planet Earth and wants to know what can be done about it.

Global environmental change, argues Michel Serres, has forced us to reconsider our relationship to nature. In this translation of his influential 1990 book Le Contrat Naturel, Serres calls for a natural contract to be negotiated between Earth and its inhabitants.
World history is often referred to as the story of human conflict. Those struggles that are seen as our history must now include the uncontrolled violence that humanity perpetrates upon the earth, and the uncontrollable menace to human life posed by the earth in reaction to this violence. Just as a social contract once brought order to human relations, Serres believes that we must now sign a "natural contract" with the earth to bring balance and reciprocity to our relations with the planet that gives us life. Our survival depends on the extent to which humans join together and act globally, on an earth now conceived as an entity.
Tracing the ancient beginnings of modernity, Serres examines the origins and possibilities of a natural contract through an extended meditation on the contractual foundations of law and science. By invoking a nonhuman, physical world, Serres asserts, science frees us from the oppressive confines of a purely social existence, but threatens to become a totalitarian order in its own right. The new legislator of the natural contract must bring science and law into balance.
Serres ends his meditation by retelling the story of the natural contract as a series of parables. He sees humanity as a spacecraft that with the help of science and technology has cast off from familiar moorings. In place of the ties that modernity and analytic reason have severed, we find a network of relations both stranger and stronger than any we once knew, binding us to one another and to the world. The philosopher's harrowing and joyous task, Serres tells us, is that of comprehending and experiencing the bonds of violence and love that unite us in our spacewalk to the spaceship Mother Earth.
"Wise, rich and poetic . . . not simply a philosophical study of the Environment, or an ecological questioning of Philosophy . . . Nature is acknowledged as an inside force which breaks [the philosopher's] discourse, and opens it up to a vigilant poetic meditation."--Substance: A Review of Theory and Literary Criticism