Notes
Notes CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION I. Raymond Williams, "Ideas of Nature," in Problems in Materialism and Culture (London: Verso, 1980), 70-71. 2. Esbjornson, "On Rethinking Resistance," 288. 3. A closely related approach is that of moral psychology, "the study of the person. . .with an eye towards its good." Horst, "Our Animal Bodies," 35. Both moral psychology and ethical anthropology have their "beginnings in the recognition that facts about what kinds of beings we are have implications, both for what vision we conceive of the human good, and for what methods we should adopt to pursue it," as Horst writes (ibid.).Moral psychology is distinguished , however, by its explicitly therapeutic methods and goals. Another related field is "virtue ethics," which contends that ethics depends on certain qualities of character rather than adherence to rules or pursuit of goals. Virtue ethicists, however, have not made explicit the ways that all ethical systems, including rule- and goal-oriented ones, rely on anthropological assumptions. 4. I am grateful to Les Thiele for drawing my attending to the ontological dimensions of these issues, which he also addresses in "Nature and Freedom," 171-90. 5. Benton, Natural Relations, 103. 6. This echoes Gustavo Gutikrrez's assertion that liberation theology represents not a new theme, but a new method for theology. Gutikrrez, A Theology of Liberation, I 5 . 7. Antonio Gramsci, "Observations on Folklore: Giovanni Crocioni," in Gramsci: Selections from Cultural Writings, ed. D. Forgacs and G. NowellSmith ; trans. W. Boelhower (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985), 189. See also Mary Midgley's claim that everyone has to do philosophy, i.e., to work out their own system of concepts, well or badly, whether they notice it or not. Midgley, Beast and Man, xxxv. 242 Notes to Pages 5-14 8. Tweed, "Introduction: Narrating U.S. Religious History," I 2. 9. Oelschlaeger, Caring for Creation, 6. 10. Ibid., 11. 11. See the two influential works by Robert Bellah, Richard Madsen, William Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven Tipton, Habits of the Heart and The Good Society. 12. Oelschlaeger, Caring for Creation, 29. 13. Ibid., 99, 186; see also 230. 14. Ibid., 119-20, 123, 222. 15. Ibid., 9, 112, 189-90. Oelschlaeger, like most environmental ethicists, at least in the United States, also shies away from explicit critiques of the free market economy and related social and political arrangements. Some environmental activists and theorists from the United Kingdom, Latin America, and elsewhere have pointed to the close links between capitalism and current forms of environmental degradation. Few environmental or social ethicists, however, have explored these links or their ties to dominant Western philosophical (and often religious) assumptions about human nature. See Benton, Natural Relations , for a more openly leftist perspective on some of these issues. 16. Paul Santmire's The Travail of Nature does highlight the fact that salvation and eschatology are at the center of different Christian attitudes toward nature. 17. Oelschlaeger, Caring for Creation, 176-77. See also Deloria, God Is Red. 18. Other works that look at the potential of non-Western religions include Roger Gottlieb, ed., This Sacred Earth: Religion, Nature, Environment (London : Routledge, 1996); Taylor, ed., Ecological Resistance Movements; Suzuki and Knudtson, The Wisdom of the Elders; and various studies of Asian religions and ecology, including J. Baird Callicott and Roger Ames, eds., Nature in Asian Traditions of Thought: Essays in Environmental Philosophy (Albany: StateUniversity of New York Press, 1989); Alan Hunt Badiner, ed., Dharma Gaia (Berkeley : Parallax Press, 1990); Mary Evelyn Tucker and Duncan Ryuken Williams, eds., Buddhism and Ecology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997); De Silva, Environmental Philosophy and Ethics in Buddhism; and L. Nelson, ed., Purifying the Earthly Body of God. Zimmerman, Contesting Earth's Future; and Gart., Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis, both explore the role of postmodern science in environmental ethics. 19. Callicott, Earth's Insights, 198. 20. Callicott, "The Metaphysical Implications of Ecology," 60. 21. Callicott, Earth's Insights, 10. 22. Leopold, A Sand County Almanac, 239. Callicott discusses his interpretation of Leopold's ethic in In Defense of the Land Ethic. 23. Callicott, Earth's Insights, 82. 24. Ibid., III, 121; John G. Neihardt, Black Elk Speaks: Being the Life Story of a Holy Man of the Oglala Sioux (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1961). 25. Ibid., 158. 26. Ibid., 186, 189. Callicott acknowledges that his endorsement of a single, Notes to Pages I 5-29 243 global ethic and of the universality of contemporary science is open to criticism (ironically, given his faith in postmodern science...
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