Environmental Values Environmental Values
Environmental Values 8(1999): 485-497. doi: 10.3197/096327199129341932
ABSTRACT: An important tradition in popular and academic environmentalist thought concentrates on cosmological issues, to do with overarching (or underlying) views about the nature of reality and the place of humanity in nature. This tradition connects the environmental crisis with anthropocentric and mechanistic cosmologies, and tries to address this crisis through cosmological critique and reconstruction - a practice I call 'cosmological intervention'. This practice presupposes a link between 'world view' and 'ethos'. I argue that an environmentalist ethos does not necessarily or automatically follow from the world view elements propounded in cosmological interventions. Rather, world view symbolises ethos. Cosmologies favoured by environmentalists describe the abstract and necessary properties of the world in ways which reflect those concrete and contingent properties of the world that the ecology movement seeks to protect, extend and celebrate.
KEYWORDS: environment, cosmology, worldview, deep ecology, environmental thought
This article is available online (PDF format) from Ingenta Journals. Access is free if your institution subscribes to Environmental Values.
Reprints of this article can be ordered from the British Library Document
Supply Service or ingenta
Contact the publishers for subscriptions and back numbers of Environmental Values.
THE WHITE HORSE PRESS
1 Strond
ISLE OF HARRIS, HS5 3UD
Tel: +44 1859 520204