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Book Review
| Rethinking Nature: Essays in Environmental Philosophy. Edited by Bruce V. Foltz and Robert Frodeman. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004. vi + 357 pp. Notes, list of contributors, index. Cloth $60.00, paper $24.95.
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| Both environmental history and environmental planning are centrally concerned with the enterprise of environmental philosophy—in building moral and ethical foundations to our consideration of the world, and in innovating novel and telling frames of reference for it—and so this book is at least a welcome addition to the field. However, and as caution, it is clearly oriented toward the enterprise of advancing the cause of post-Kantian Continental philosophers—Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Hans-Georg Gaddamer, and Jacques Derrida, for instance, and in the traditions of phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, structuralism, poststructuralism and postmodernism, deconstruction, and critical theory. Of course, the root project of postmodernism, which is to innovate ways of knowing complexity from within the limits of human cognition, is well established. But still, the Continental turn remains an acquired taste, perhaps more suited to the pursuit of evocative or contemplative literary depiction. |
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The book intends "to expand the conceptual space of European philosophy to include a focus upon the natural environment, and ... to bring the distinctive approaches of the Continental tradition to our concerns with the natural world" (p. 7). In this, it succeeds reasonably well—from the wonderfully transformative reframing in James Hatley's "The Uncanny Goodness of Being Edible to Bears" (pp. 13–31), to the slightly more strained but still evocative reaching of Ingrid Stefanovic's "Children and the Ethics of Place" (pp. 55–76). |
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As with most edited volumes, some of the chapters have more depth, others more breadth. For instance, Robert Frodeman's "Philosophy in the Field" (pp. 149–64), uses the geologist's gaze to vividly illustrate the idea that how we go about knowing nature hugely affects what we can know about nature; Trish Glazebrook (pp. 95–113) ranges more widely through time, providing a survey of the ways in which philosophers have come to know, and to use their knowing of, nature; David Abram's reflections on reciprocity (pp. 77–94) are presented as the foundational relationship in constituting nature as process, yet require recognition by human agency before nature in itself can become nature known; while Elaine Miller's attention to metaphor and to language shows an account of plant as paradigm (pp. 114–34), underscoring that the explanatory power of our practice of individuating nature is surely constrained by our recognition that such a reductive practice will always bring us to a place where "certain possibilities of conceiving the human relationship with nature are always already excluded" (131). Michael Zimmerman (pp. 207–30) does a very respectable job of setting the frame and delimiting the range of an effort to connect Continental philosophy with environmental philosophy, followed most usefully by Diane Michelfelder's chapter (pp. 231–44) which structures inquiry within the particularizing context of an environmental ethic. |
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The book will be a welcome addition to any shelf that seeks to better integrate diverse ways of taking account of nature into the project of knowing and telling about an evolutionary and complex inhabited world. But it has not the legs to stand alone as a stable exploration of the interrelationships between nature, philosophy, and ecology. |
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Ashwani Vasishth is a regional environmental planner, and a doctoral candidate at the University of Southern California. His practice and research are focused on articulating what it might mean to take an evolutionary ecosystem approach to environmental planning. |
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