Nature: An Environmental Cosmology

Provides a set of normative measures to assess the value of nature and proposes the new discipline of foundational ecology as a response to environmental crisis.A breakthrough analysis of our environmental crisis, this book offers the insights of thinkers such as Plato, Lao-Tzu, Spinoza, and Whitehead to construct a set of concrete measures to estimate the value of nature. Application of these standards leads to the formation of the discipline of Foundational Ecology as the most effective educational tool for dealing with the next century's environmental crises. The real value of environmental processes comes alive through this systematic philosophy of nature. By offering a cultural critique of our idea of nature, Grange sets the environmental agenda for the next century.This is a brilliant work that illustrates one of its central categories, 'depth, ' in its own construction. First, it presents an original and massively convincing argument that the philosophical problem of our time is not recovery of forgotten Being, as Heidegger argued, but rather the encounter with novelty in ways that overwhelm most Western philosophy. The second thing I like about this book is that the topic through which the first point is argued is ecology, in the sense of human culture relating to its environment...The third thing I like is the cosmology itself...The fourth thing I like is that the book demonstrates that there is now a fairly wide circle of philosophers at home in speculative metaphysics and its connections with ethics and social theory -- a group influenced in some way by Whitehead -- and it shows that there is a real alternative to analytic philosophy and continental philosophy, one that comes out of the American tradition. A fifth strength of the book is the natural progression of its argument. It lays out a speculative system in rhetorically clear and evocative terms, treating the technical matters with precision but also with metaphoric richness. --