Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Problems
- 2 Causes
- 3 Solutions I: Voting and Pricing
- 4 Solutions II: Moral Theory
- 5 Animals
- 6 Life
- 7 Rivers, Species, Land
- 8 Deep Ecology
- 9 Value
- 10 Beauty
- 11 Human Beings
- Afterword
- Appendix A Deep Ecology: Central Texts
- Appendix B The Axiarchical View
- Appendix C Gaia
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Introduction
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction
- 1 Problems
- 2 Causes
- 3 Solutions I: Voting and Pricing
- 4 Solutions II: Moral Theory
- 5 Animals
- 6 Life
- 7 Rivers, Species, Land
- 8 Deep Ecology
- 9 Value
- 10 Beauty
- 11 Human Beings
- Afterword
- Appendix A Deep Ecology: Central Texts
- Appendix B The Axiarchical View
- Appendix C Gaia
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
In the second half of his long life the art critic, educator, failed husband and utopian socialist John Ruskin became increasingly concerned about the state of nature:
This first day of May, 1869, I am writing where my work was begun thirty-five years ago, within sight of the snows of the higher Alps. In that half of the permitted life of man, I have seen strange evil brought upon every scene that I best loved, or tried to make beloved by others. The light which once flushed those pale summits with its rose at dawn, and purple at sunset, is now umbered and faint; the air which once inlaid the clefts of all their golden crags with azure is now defiled with languid coils of smoke, belched from worse than volcanic fires; their very glacier waves are ebbing, and their snows fading, as if Hell had breathed on them; the waters that once sank their feet into crystalline are now dimmed and foul, from deep to deep, and shore to shore. These are no careless words – they are accurately – horribly – true. I know what the Swiss lakes were; no pool of Alpine fountain at its source was clearer. This morning, on the Lake of Geneva, at half a mile from the beach, I could scarcely see my oar-blade a fathom deep.
Anxieties about pollution, climate change and the deterioration of the natural world are not new, even if they are more widespread now than a century or so ago.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Environmental Philosophy , pp. vii - xivPublisher: Acumen PublishingPrint publication year: 2001