Our Limits Transgressed: Environmental Political Thought in America - Hardcover

Taylor, Bob Pepperman

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9780700605422: Our Limits Transgressed: Environmental Political Thought in America

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0700605428 ISBN 13: 9780700605422

Publisher: Univ Pr of Kansas, 1992

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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.

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From the Back Cover:

"This book is must reading for all serious students of environmentalism and environmental politics. It is also a major contribution to the understanding of contemporary American political ideas. It is one of the most important and successful attempts to analyze and synthesize the major themes and trends of modern environmental thought. In order to discover the central fault line among environmental thinkers, Taylor replaces the conventional distinction between preservationism and conservationism with the far more satisfactory distinction between pastoralism and progressivism. Most importantly, he recognizes that environmental thought cannot be understood apart from its broader political underpinnings and implications. He deftly and sympathetically strives to understand the political vision contained in the work of each of the major American environmental thinkers and how it informs their understanding of the relationship between persons and nature."--Marc Landy, coauthor of The Environmental Protection Agency: Asking the Wrong Questions

"The contemporary environmental movement needs to step back from the hurly-burly of its political struggles to do some deep thinking about ends and means. This book is a useful tool for doing that. It is a clearly written, well organized, and thoughtful guide to many of the more important thinkers who have appeared in recent decades on environmental issues and ethics. Best of all, the author points us to what may be the central question of our times: how can we achieve a society that is at once true to our democratic traditions and yet recognizes in nature an intrinsic set of values?"--Donald Worster, author of Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas

About the Author:

Bob Pepperman Taylor is associate professor of political science at the University of Vermont and the author of America's Bachelor Uncle: Thoreau and the American Polity.

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