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2An Ethics of Place: Radical Ecology, Postmodernity, and Social TheoryEnvironmental Values 12 (4): 542-543. 2003.
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4Book Review: Engaging Voices: Tales of Morality and Meaning in an Age of Global Warming (review)Environmental Values 20 (4): 569-571. 2011.
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15Lost for Words? Gadamer and Benjamin on the Nature of Language and the 'Language' of NatureEnvironmental Values 10 (1): 59-75. 2001.Language is commonly regarded as an exclusively human attribute and the possession of the word has long served to demarcate culture from nature. This is often taken to imply that nature is incapable of meaningful expression, that any meaning it acquires is merely bestowed upon it by humanity. This anthropic logocentrism seriously undermines those forms of 'environmental advocacy' which claim to find and speak of the meaning and value of nature perse. However, shorn of their own anthropocentric p…Read more
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22New Perspectives on AnarchismLexington Books. 2009.The study of anarchism as a philosophical, political, and social movement has burgeoned both in the academy and in the global activist community in recent years. Taking advantage of this boom in anarchist scholarship, Nathan J. Jun and Shane Wahl have compiled twenty-six cutting-edge essays on this timely topic in New Perspectives on Anarchism
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12To Speak of Trees: Social Constructivism, Environmental Values, and the Future of Deep EcologyEnvironmental Ethics 21 (4): 359-376. 1999.The power and the promise of deep ecology is seen, by its supporters and detractors alike, to lie in its claims to speak on behalf of a natural world threatened by human excesses. Yet, to speak of trees as trees or nature as something worthy of respect in itself has appeared increasingly difficult in the light of social constructivist accounts of “nature.” Deep ecology has been loath to take constructivism’s insightsseriously, retreating into forms of biological objectivism and reductionism. Yet…Read more
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26Worldly (In)Difference and Ecological Ethics: Iris Murdoch and Emmanuel LevinasEnvironmental Ethics 29 (1): 23-41. 2007.The natural world’s myriad differences from human beings, and its apparent indifference to human purposes and ends, are often regarded as problems an environmental ethics must overcome. Perhaps, though, ecological ethics might instead be re-envisaged as a form of other-directed concern that responds to just this situation. That is, the recognition of worldly (in)difference might actually be regarded as a precondition for, and opening on, any contemporary ethics, whether human or ecological. What…Read more
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23Worldly (In)Difference and Ecological EthicsEnvironmental Ethics 29 (1): 23-41. 2007.The natural world’s myriad differences from human beings, and its apparent indifference to human purposes and ends, are often regarded as problems an environmental ethics must overcome. Perhaps, though, ecological ethics might instead be re-envisaged as a form of other-directed concern that responds to just this situation. That is, the recognition of worldly (in)difference might actually be regarded as a precondition for, and opening on, any contemporary ethics, whether human or ecological. What…Read more
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68To speak of trees: Social constructivism, environmental values, and the future of deep ecologyEnvironmental Ethics 21 (4): 359-376. 1999.The power and the promise of deep ecology is seen, by its supporters and detractors alike, to lie in its claims to speak on behalf of a natural world threatened by human excesses. Yet, to speak of trees as trees or nature as something worthy of respect in itself has appeared increasingly difficult in the light of social constructivist accounts of “nature.” Deep ecology has been loath to take constructivism’s insightsseriously, retreating into forms of biological objectivism and reductionism. Yet…Read more
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38The State of Nature: The Political Philosophy of Primitivism and the Culture of ContaminationEnvironmental Values 11 (4): 407-425. 2002.The ' state of nature ' could be understood in two senses; both in terms of its nature 's current condition and of that unmediated and pre-contractual relation between humanity and the environment posited by political philosophers like Locke and Rousseau and now championed by anarcho- primitivism. Primitivism is easily dismissed as an extreme, naïve and impractical form of radical environmentalism but its emergence signifies contemporary disaffection with the ideology of 'progress' so central to…Read more
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31Shadow and shade: The ethopoietics of enlightenmentEthics, Place and Environment 6 (2). 2003.Modern Western thought and culture have envisaged their task in terms of a metaphorics, a metaphysics and a technics of 'enlightenment'. However, the ethical and environmental implications of this determination to dispel all shadows have become increasingly pernicious as modernity both extends and alters the conceptualization and employment of (a now artificial) light as a tool of discovery and control. Drawing on the work of Foucault and Benjamin amongst others, this paper seeks to illustrate, …Read more
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15Rethinking the Communicative Turn (review)International Studies in Philosophy 36 (1): 215-216. 2004.
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6Rethinking the Communicative Turn (review)International Studies in Philosophy 36 (1): 215-216. 2004.
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138Repetition and difference: Lefebvre, le corbusier and modernity's (im)moral landscapeEthics, Place and Environment 4 (1). 2001.If, as Lefebvre argues, every society produces its own social space, then modernity might be characterized by that (anti-)social and instrumental space epitomized and idealized in Le Corbusier's writings. This repetitively patterned space consumes and regulates the differences between places and people; it encapsulates a normalizing morality that seeks to reduce all differences to an economic order of the Same. Lefebvre's dialectical conceptualization of 'difference' can both help explain the op…Read more
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13‘It Makes My Skin Crawl...’: The Embodiment of Disgust in Phobias of ‘Nature’Body and Society 12 (1): 43-67. 2006.Specific phobias of natural objects, such as moths, spiders and snakes, are both common and socially significant, but they have received relatively little sociological attention. Studies of specific phobias have noted that embodied experiences of disgust are intimately associated with phobic reactions, but generally explain this in terms of objective qualities of the object concerned and/or evolutionary models. We draw on the work of Kolnai, Douglas and Kristeva to provide an alternative phenome…Read more
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14‘It Makes My Skin Crawl...’: The Embodiment of Disgust in Phobias of ‘Nature’Body and Society 12 (1): 43-67. 2006.Specific phobias of natural objects, such as moths, spiders and snakes, are both common and socially significant, but they have received relatively little sociological attention. Studies of specific phobias have noted that embodied experiences of disgust are intimately associated with phobic reactions, but generally explain this in terms of objective qualities of the object concerned and/or evolutionary models. We draw on the work of Kolnai, Douglas and Kristeva to provide an alternative phenome…Read more
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35Hermeneutics and the culture of birds: The environmental allegory of 'easter island'Ethics, Place and Environment 8 (1). 2005.It has become commonplace to interpret 'Easter Island' in terms of an environmental allegory, a Malthusian morality tale of the consequences of over-exploitation of limited natural resources. There are, however, ethical dangers in treating places and peoples allegorically, as moralized means (lessons) to satisfy others' edificatory ends. Allegory reductively appropriates the past, presenting a specific interpretation as 'given' (fixed) and exemplary, wrongly suggesting that meanings and morals, …Read more
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23Environmental Risks and Ethical ResponsibilitiesEnvironmental Ethics 28 (3): 227-246. 2006.The question of environmental responsibility is addressed through comparisons between Hannah Arendt’s and Ulrich Beck’s accounts of the emergent and globally threatening risks associated with acting into nature. Both theorists have been extraordinarily influential in their respective fields but their insights, pointing toward the politicization of nature through human intervention, are rarely brought into conjunction. Important differences stem from Beck’s treatment of risks as systemic and unav…Read more
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5Emotion, Place and CultureRoutledge. 2009.There has been a rapid rise in engagement with emotion and affect across a range of disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, with geographers making a significant contribution by examining the emotional intersections between people and places. This book investigates feelings and affect in various spatial and social contexts.
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14EpharmosisEnvironmental Ethics 32 (4): 385-404. 2010.Concerns for the more-than-human world are consistently marginalized by dominant forms of philosophical and political humanism, characterized here by their unquestioning acceptance of human sovereignty over the world. A genuinely ecological political philosophy needs post-humanist concepts to begin articulating alternative notions of “ecological communities” as ethical and political, and not just biological realities. Drawing upon Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of community, epharmosis, a largely defu…Read more
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27Ethical difference(s): A response to maycroft on le corbusier and LefebvreEthics, Place and Environment 5 (3). 2002.This Article does not have an abstract
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33EpharmosisEnvironmental Ethics 32 (4): 385-404. 2010.Concerns for the more-than-human world are consistently marginalized by dominant forms of philosophical and political humanism, characterized here by their unquestioning acceptance of human sovereignty over the world. A genuinely ecological political philosophy needs post-humanist concepts to begin articulating alternative notions of “ecological communities” as ethical and political, and not just biological realities. Drawing upon Jean-Luc Nancy’s concept of community, epharmosis, a largely defu…Read more
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23Citizens, Denizens and the Res Publica: Environmental Ethics, Structures of Feeling and Political ExpressionEnvironmental Values 14 (2). 2005.Environmental ethics should be understood as a radical project that challenges the limits of contemporary ethical and political expression, a limit historically defined by the concept of the citizen. This dominant model of public being, frequently justified in terms of a formal or procedural rationally, facilitates an exclusionary ethos that fails to properly represent our concerns for the non-human world. It tends to regard emotionally mediated concerns for others as a source of irrational and …Read more