Our limits transgressed: environmental political thought in America

Abstract

Is democracy hazardous to the health of the environment? Addressing this and related questions, Bob Pepperman Taylor analyzes contemporary environmental political thought in America. He begins with the premise that environmental thinking is necessarily political thinking because environmental problems, in both their cause and effect, are collective problems. They are also problems that signal limits to what the environment can tolerate. Those limits directly challenge orthodox democratic theory, which encourages expanding individual and political freedoms and is predicated on growth and abundance in our society. Balancing the competing needs of the natural world and the polity, Taylor asserts, must become the heart of the environmental debate. According to Taylor, contemporary environmental thinking derives from two well-established traditions in American political thought--the pastoral and the progressive. Any satisfactory resolution of the tension between the garden and the machine must draw upon the best of both. His analysis covers such classical environmental thinkers as Thoreau, Muir, and Pinchot, as well as contemporary thinkers including Christopher Stone, Mark Sagoff, William Ophuls, J. Baird Callicott, Holmes Rolston, Paul Taylor, Barry Commoner, and Murray Bookchin.