Refounding Environmental Ethics

Providing a bold and original rethinking of environmental ethics, Ben Minteer's Refounding Environmental Ethicswill 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-centred" 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.

Ben A. Minteer is Associate Professor of Environmental Ethics and Policy in the School of Life Sciences and Senior Sustainability Scholar in the Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University. He is the author of The Landscape of Reform: Civic Pragmatism and Environmental Thought in America and the editor of Nature in Common? Environmental Ethics and the Contested Foundations of Environmental Policy (Temple).