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17Cheney and the myth of postmodernismEnvironmental Ethics 15 (1): 3-17. 1993.I draw critical parallels between Jim Cheney’s work and various aspects of modernism, which he ignores or misrepresents. I argue, first, that Cheney’s history of ideas is appallingly crude. He amalgamates all past Western philosophical traditions, irrespective of their disparate backgrounds and complex interrelationships, under the single heading, modern. Then he posits a radical epistemological break between a deluded modernism—characterized as foundationalist, essentialist, colonizing, and tot…Read more
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47Against the enclosure of the ethical commons: Radical environmentalism as an “ethics of place”Environmental Ethics 19 (4): 339-353. 1997.Inspired by recent anti-roads protests in Britain, I attempt to articulate a radical environmental ethos and, at the same time, to produce a cogent moral analysis of the dialectic between environmental destruction and protection. In this analysis, voiced in terms of a spatial metaphoric, an “ethics of place,” I seek to subvert the hegemony of modernity’s formal systematization and codification of values whilestill conserving something of modernity’s critical heritage: to reconstitute ethics in o…Read more
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15Andrew Biro, ed.: Critical Ecologies: The Frankfurt School and Contemporary Environmental CrisisEnvironmental Ethics 35 (2): 247-250. 2013.
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27Ecology, Community and Food Sovereignty: What's in a Word?Environmental Values 27 (6): 665-686. 2018.'Food sovereignty' plays an increasingly important political role as a focus for grassroots agri-food organisations, such as La Via Campesina, in their attempts to contest the social injustices, health impacts and ecological damage resulting from the increasing global dominance of corporate/industrial agriculture. While not seeking to detract from the successes of such movements, there remain ethical, political and ecological concerns about just how the 'sovereignty' in food sovereignty is to be…Read more
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39Environmental Anamnesis: Walter Benjamin and the Ethics of ExtinctionEnvironmental Ethics 23 (4): 359-376. 2001.Environmentalists often recount tales of recent extinctions in the form of an allegory of human moral failings. But such allegories install an instrumental relation to the past’s inhabitants, using them to carry moralistic messages. Taking the passenger pigeon as a case in point, I argue for a different, ethical relation to the past’s inhabitants that conserves something of the wonder and “strangeness of the Other.” What Walter Benjamin refers to as the “redemptive moment” sparks a recognition o…Read more
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12Edward Hyams: Ecology and Politics 'Under the Vine'Environmental Values 20 (1): 95-119. 2011.This paper offers an assessment of the agricultural eco-politics of Edward Hyams, novelist, gardener, historian, broadcaster and anarchist. It focuses in particular on his collaboration with the conservative writer on rural England, and founding member of the Soil Association, H.J. Massingham which resulted in a book, Prophecy of Famine — a fundamental critique of the effects of industrial capitalism on farming and a call for agricultural self-sufficiency and soil conservation. This collaboratio…Read more
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77Wittgenstein and Irigaray: Gender and Philosophy in a Language (Game) of DifferenceHypatia 14 (2). 1999.Drawing Wittgenstein's and Irigaray's philosophies into conversation might help resolve certain misunderstandings that have so far hampered both the reception of Irigaray's work and the development of feminist praxis in general. A Wittgensteinian reading of Irigaray can furnish an anti-essentialist conception of "woman" that retains the theoretical and political specificity feminism requires while dispelling charges that Irigaray's attempt to delineate a "feminine" language is either groundlessl…Read more