The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (History of American Thought and Culture)

Rating:
Summary: 'right'-ly needed natural history
Review: This book, as all of Prof. Nash's writings, serves as the standard to compare against all others in the growing field of environmental theory and related scholarship. Nash expands upon his codex of natural "rights" in relation to America's foremost natural thinker - Thoreau - in his Afterword to my recently published book "Deep Immersion: Thoreau's Engagement with Water."

Rating:
Summary: thoughtful, intensive, well-written
Review: This is a very informative and crisply written history of environmental thought and politics in the U.S., from John Muir to Peter Singer. It offers a great deal of thoughtful commentary, for example on the gradual shift in focus from tangible benefits for humans (underlying the conservation and national parks movement circa 1900) to inherent rights of nature itself (signalled e.g. by the Endangered Species Act). It's not hard to see that Nash is sympathetic to many of these causes, and clearly this book isn't for folks who prefer to view things in strictly economic terms, but still it is quite well-balanced in tone, and the scholarship is really impressive. I highly recommend it to anyone interested at all in the environmental movement, or American intellectual history generally, or simply looking for some thought-provoking reading. 220 pp., plus 50 pp. of notes.