The debate within environmental philosophy over anthropocentrism - its character, moral relevance, defensibility, avoidability and possible meanings - has consumed a great deal of ink, but arguably the eclipse of deep ecology and the rise of debates over the Anthropocene have rather sidelined those discussions in recent years. In this book, however, Keith Peterson works to give a novel and nuanced treatment of the ills of anthropocentrism, or at least certain aspects of it as conceived within the customary worldviews and practices of Western capitalist societies. In doing so he draws centrally on ecofeminist and political ecology critiques and trains his primary attention on a feature that is widely acknowledged but has tended to be backgrounded in much environmental ethics literature: the asymmetry of human dependence on the natural world, and how our customary anthropocentric orientations deny or ignore this. As such, some of the key starting premises of the book draw on the work of the late Australian ecofeminist philosopher Val Plumwood, whose critique of the various types of antagonistic dualism embedded in conventional anthropocentric perspectives remains of enduring worth. In terms of organisation and themes, the book starts with a brief introduction to give context, and is then split into three parts, dealing respectively with 'the conditions under which environmentalists and others generally think about the nature of humankind (philosophical anthropology), how they think about the value of nonhuman nature (metaethics and value theory), and how they understand more-than-human nature generally (ontology and epistemology)' (p. 4). Unsurprisingly, Part Two is the longest of these, with three chapters dedicated to the axiological issues, while Part Three is shortest, consisting of one full length chapter on metascientific stances and ecological ontology and a fairly brief summarising conclusion. The two chapters of Part One can loosely be described as respectively the negative and positive sides of Peterson's philosophical anthropology: Chapter One draws upon Plumwood's account of dualism and her 'liberation model' (p. 30) of analysing and opposing it, then critiques alternative environmentalist models of human agency that draw upon neo-Kantian idealism or reductionist naturalism. Chapter Two opts to sketch 'some elements of a philosophical anthropology for critical environmental philosophy' that will fit with 'Plumwood's criteria for a liberation model of anthropocentrism' (p. 48), and fulfilling this exercise takes the form of a nonre-ductive version of naturalism, drawing on the work of figures such as Michael Tomasello and Marjorie Grene as well as early twentieth century German philosophical anthropologists, and to a lesser extent Mary Midgley. The central idea here is the creation of a model of human agency that sits between the excesses of naturalism and social constructivism, a characterisation of 'humankind as an unfinished animal' (p. 57) that is naturalistically based in evolutionary theory and ecology, but which strongly focuses on the role of culture as necessary for completing the development of each human being towards being able to perceive, think, learn and act. Humans are thus uniquely flexible in their interactive receptivity and learning within the socio-natural world, as well as in the centrality of this flexibility and learning to their subsequent development. This in turn denotes that values cannot be simply read off in some supposedly given hierarchy from a conception of the natural, but rather that felt conflicts of values are necessary parts of the human condition, articulated through language and actions, and fundamentally connected to goal-directed action in the world. Importantly, Peterson sees this conception of humankind as undermining the customary nature-culture and needs-interests dualisms, and thus paves the way for Part Two's discussion of values.
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