The Wilderness Debate Rages On

Download or read book The Wilderness Debate Rages on written by Michael P. Nelson and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 1488 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ten years ago, The Great New Wilderness Debate began a cross-disciplinary conversation about the varied constructions of "wilderness" and the controversies that surround them. The Wilderness Debate Rages On will reinvigorate that conversation and usher in a second decade of debate. Like its predecessor, the book gathers both critiques and defenses of the idea of wilderness from a wide variety of perspectives and voices. The Wilderness Debate Rages On includes the best explorations of the concept of the concept of wilderness from the past decade, underappreciated essays from the early twentieth century that offer an alternative vision of the concept and importance of wilderness, and writings meant to clarify or help us rethink the concept of wilderness. Narrative writers such as Wendell Berry, Scott Russell Sanders, Marilynne Robinson, Kathleen Dean Moore, and Lynn Maria Laitala are also given a voice in order to show how the wilderness debate is expanding outside the academy. The writers represented in the anthology include ecologists, environmental philosophers, conservation biologists, cultural geographers, and environmental activists. The book begins with little-known papers by early twentieth-century ecologists advocating the preservation of natural areas for scientific study, not, as did Thoreau, Muir, and the early Leopold, for purposes of outdoor recreation. The editors argue that had these writers influenced the eventual development of federal wilderness policy, our national wilderness system would better serve contemporary conservation priorities for representative ecosystems and biodiversity.

Download or read book The Great New Wilderness Debate written by J. Baird Callicott and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 716 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Great New Wilderness Debate is an expansive, wide-ranging collection that addresses the pivotal environmental issues of the modern era. This eclectic volume on the varied constructions of “wilderness” reveals the recent controversies that surround those conceptions, and the gulf between those who argue for wilderness "preservation" and those who argue for "wise use." J. Baird Callicott and Michael P. Nelson have selected thirty-nine essays that provide historical context, range broadly across the issues, and set forth the positions of the debate. Beginning with such well-known authors as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and Aldo Leopold, the collection moves forward to the contemporary debate and presents seminal works by a number of the most distinguished scholars in environmental history and environmental philosophy. The Great New Wilderness Debate also includes essays by conservation biologists, cultural geographers, environmental activists, and contemporary writers on the environment.

Download or read book Rethinking Wilderness written by Mark Woods and published by Broadview Press. This book was released on 2017-07-13 with total page 314 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concept and values of wilderness, along with the practice of wilderness preservation, have been under attack for the past several decades. In Rethinking Wilderness, Mark Woods responds to seven prominent anti-wilderness arguments. Woods offers a rethinking of the received concept of wilderness, developing a positive account of wilderness as a significant location for the other-than-human value-adding properties of naturalness, wildness, and freedom. Interdisciplinary in approach, the book combines environmental philosophy, environmental history, environmental social sciences, the science of ecology, and the science of conservation biology.

Download or read book Environmental Ethics Today written by Peter S. Wenz and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2001 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Environmental Ethics Today is essential reading for anyone interested in the future of the environment, our species, and species diversity. This wide-ranging introduction to major issues and questions in environmental ethics employs an accessible, journalistic style--featuring current facts, real controversies, individual stories, and a vivid narrative--that engages readers and gives meaning to abstract philosophical concepts. Topics discussed include pollution permits for corporations, medical experimentation on animals, genetic engineering, economic globalization, biodiversity, and much more. Theories and methods such as utilitarianism, contractarianism, and hermeneutics are introduced as needed to help readers understand and attempt to resolve environmental conflicts. The book considers the views of many thinkers including Father Thomas Berry, Wendell Berry, J. Baird Callicott, Jane Goodall, Garrett Hardin, David Korten, Aldo Leopold, Arne Naess, Val Plumwood, Daniel Quinn, Tom Regan, Holmes Rolston III, Vandana Shiva, Julian Simon, Peter Singer, and Karen Warren. An exceptional primary text for courses in environmental ethics and environmental values, Environmental Ethics Today is also excellent reading for general courses in moral problems, business ethics, environmental studies, and women's studies.

Download or read book Natural Rivals written by John Clayton and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2019-08-06 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Muir and Gifford Pinchot have often been seen as the embodiment of conflicting environmental philosophies. Muir, the preservationist and co-founder of the Sierra Club. Pinchot, the first chief of the U.S. Forest Service advocating sustainability in timber harvests, instituted conservation. The idealistic Muir saw nature as something special and separate; the pragmatic Pinchot accepted that people used the products of nature. The environmental movement’s original sin, and the root of many of it's difficulties, was its inability to reconcile these two viewpoints—and these two men.So how was it that Muir and Pinchot went camping together—and delighted in each other's company? Does this mean that the seemingly irreparable divide in environmental ethos is not as unbridgeable as it might seem? The perceived rivalry between these two men has obscured a fascinating and hopeful story. Muir and Pinchot actually spent years in an alliance that lead to the original movement for public lands. Their shared commitment to the glories of natural landscapes united their disparate talents and viewpoints to create a fledgling and uniquely American vision of land ownership and management.

Download or read book Man in the Landscape written by Paul Shepard and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-07-01 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A pioneering exploration of the roots of our attitudes toward nature, Paul Shepard's most seminal work is as challenging and provocative today as when it first appeared in 1967. Man in the Landscape was among the first books of a new genre that has elucidated the ideas, beliefs, and images that lie behind our modern destruction and conservation of the natural world. Departing from the traditional study of land use as a history of technology, this book explores the emergence of modern attitudes in literature, art, and architecture--their evolutionary past and their taproot in European and Mediterranean cultures. With humor and wit, Shepard considers the influence of Christianity on ideas of nature, the absence of an ethic of nature in modern philosophy, and the obsessive themes of dominance and control as elements of the modern mind. In his discussions of the exploration of the American West, the establishment of the first national parks, and the reactions of pioneers to their totally new habitat, he identifies the transport of traditional imagery into new places as a sort of cultural baggage.

Download or read book Thoreau's Living Ethics written by Philip Cafaro and published by University of Georgia Press. This book was released on 2010-01-25 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thoreau's Living Ethics is the first full, rigorous account of Henry Thoreau's ethical philosophy. Focused on Walden but ranging widely across his writings, the study situates Thoreau within a long tradition of ethical thinking in the West, from the ancients to the Romantics and on to the present day. Philip Cafaro shows Thoreau grappling with important ethical questions that agitated his own society and discusses his value for those seeking to understand contemporary ethical issues. Cafaro's particular interest is in Thoreau's treatment of virtue ethics: the branch of ethics centered on personal and social flourishing. Ranging across the central elements of Thoreau's philosophy—life, virtue, economy, solitude and society, nature, and politics—Cafaro shows Thoreau developing a comprehensive virtue ethics, less based in ancient philosophy than many recent efforts and more grounded in modern life and experience. He presents Thoreau's evolutionary, experimental ethics as superior to the more static foundational efforts of current virtue ethicists. Another main focus is Thoreau's environmental ethics. The book shows Thoreau not only anticipating recent arguments for wild nature's intrinsic value, but also demonstrating how a personal connection to nature furthers self-development, moral character, knowledge, and creativity. Thoreau's life and writings, argues Cafaro, present a positive, life-affirming environmental ethics, combining respect and restraint with an appreciation for human possibilities for flourishing within nature.