Alienation and Nature in Environmental Philosophy Simon Hailwood

摘要

Aldo Leopold once declared that there were two "spiritual dangers" in not owning a farm, with one being "the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace" (Leopold 1989, 6). The dangers that Leopold was signaling were various, of course, but in that essay they primarily gathered around the problems caused by human distance from nature's operations, the manners in which we can become divorced from the roots of life by a failure to recognize the processes from which food and heat derive. However, Leopold did not repudiate the technologies involved in running a farmhouse, and he clearly recognized that significant paradoxes are involved in the use of human gadgetry for such purposes as sport hunting. The questions thus arise as to whether it is sensible or valuable at any point to speak of modern humans as having become alienated from nature, and if so, what such claims may mean. It is into this tangled bank of knotty conceptual problems that Simon Hailwood bravely ventures in his new book. In doing so he expands and builds upon arguments about liberalism and nature's otherness that he has previously advanced elsewhere, most notably in his 2004 book How to Be a Green Liberal, and further develops his analysis through examination of pragmatism, Marxian thought, climate change, the end of nature thesis, environmental justice, and eco-phenomenology.