•  124
    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
  •  123
    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
  •  73
    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
  •  61
    Environmental Risks and Ethical Responsibilities
    Environmental 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
  •  52
    Environmental Anamnesis: Walter Benjamin and the Ethics of Extinction
    Environmental 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
  •  43
    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
  •  40
    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
  •  34
    Worldly (In)Difference and Ecological Ethics
    Environmental 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
  •  32
    Epharmosis
    Environmental 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
  •  28
    Shadow and shade: The ethopoietics of enlightenment
    Ethics, 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
  •  23
    This Article does not have an abstract
  •  22
    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
  •  20
    Ecology, Community and Food Sovereignty: What's in a Word?
    with Jade Monaghan
    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
  •  20
    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
  •  19
    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
  •  15
    Cheney and the myth of postmodernism
    Environmental 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
  •  14
    Avalanches and Snowballs A Reply to Arne Naess
    Environmental Ethics 23 (2): 223-224. 2001.
  •  12
    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
  •  12
    Epharmosis
    Environmental 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
  •  11
    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
  •  11
    New Perspectives on Anarchism
    with Samantha E. Bankston, Harold Barclay, Lewis Call, Alexandre J. M. E. Christoyannopoulos, Vernon Cisney, Jesse Cohn, Abraham DeLeon, Francis Dupuis-Déri, Benjamin Franks, Clive Gabay, Karen Goaman, Rodrigo Gomes Guimarães, Uri Gordon, James Horrox, Anthony Ince, Sandra Jeppesen, Stavros Karageorgakis, Elizabeth Kolovou, Thomas Martin, Todd May, Nicolae Morar, Irène Pereira, Stevphen Shukaitis, Scott Turner, Salvo Vaccaro, Mitchell Verter, Dana Ward, and Dana M. Williams
    Lexington 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
  •  10
    Rethinking the Communicative Turn (review)
    International Studies in Philosophy 36 (1): 215-216. 2004.
  •  10
    ‘It Makes My Skin Crawl...’: The Embodiment of Disgust in Phobias of ‘Nature’
    with Joyce Davidson
    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
  •  9
    ‘It Makes My Skin Crawl...’: The Embodiment of Disgust in Phobias of ‘Nature’
    with Joyce Davidson
    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
  •  8
    The Working Landscape (review)
    Environmental Ethics 31 (1): 97-100. 2009.
  •  4
    Emotion, Place and Culture
    with Liz Bondi
    Routledge. 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.
  •  4
    Edward 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