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Environmental Values

Re-Thinking Nature: Towards an Eco-Pluralism

Environmental Values 12(2003): 337-360. doi: 10.3197/096327103129341351

Both scientific realism and social constructionism offer unpromising and even destructive ways of trying to understand nature and human-nature relations. The reasons include what these apparent opponents share: a commitment to the (latterly) modernist division between subject/culture and object/nature that results from what is here called 'monist essentialism'. It is contrasted with 'relational pluralism', which provides the basis of a better alternative - ecopluralism - which, properly understood, is necessarily both ecocentric and pluralist.

KEYWORDS: Pluralism, monism, ecocentrism, realism, constructionism

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