Guest Editor's Note

The term "eco-art" is used to describe art that expresses an environmentalist spirit, but art is always a nexus of nature and culture. Through artful manipulations of matter and ideas, the human animal develops, investigates, and questions itself, in complex relation to social and nonhuman realms. Artists motivated by ecological values create work that challenges assumptions about those realms, and enact new forms of being, engagement, and restoration.

Most artists I know are very philosophical about their work. Writing can be art, of course, and philosophy itself is a foundational form of human creativity. For this issue we invited theorists, artists, teachers, and curators to engage the art of the essay in innovative ways. In addition to analytic arguments, here you will find philosophers writing as storytellers, theorists writing as activists, and artists writing penetrating theory. We hope that this work introduces you to new ideas and new arts, and that it inspires further practical conversation about ethics, nature, politics, and creativity.

I would like to thank Vicky Davion, editor of Ethics & the Environment, for welcoming the idea of a special issue focusing on art, and managing editor Mona Freer, for her expert attention to copyediting and compilation. I also thank all of the contributors and artists who helped this diverse and wide-ranging issue come to life.