@article{1386083,
      recid = {1386083},
      author = {Meyer, John M.},
      title = {Political nature : environmentalism and the interpretation  of Western thought /},
      publisher = {MIT Press,},
      address = {Cambridge, Mass. :},
      pages = {1 online resource (xii, 210 pages)},
      year = {2001},
      abstract = {Concern over environmental problems is prompting us to  reexamine established thinking about society and politics.  The challenge is to find a way for the public's concern for  the environment to become more integral to social,  economic, and political decision making. Two  interpretations have dominated Western portrayals of the  nature-politics relationship, what John Meyer calls the  dualist and the derivative. The dualist account holds that  politics--and human culture in general--is completely  separate from nature. The derivative account views Western  political thought as derived from conceptions of nature,  whether Aristotelian teleology, the clocklike mechanism of  early modern science, or Darwinian selection. Meyer  examines the nature-politics relationship in the writings  of two of its most pivotal theorists, Aristotle and Thomas  Hobbes, and of contemporary environmentalist thinkers. He  concludes that we must overcome the limitations of both the  dualist and the derivative interpretations if we are to  understand the relationship between nature and  politics.Human thought and action, says Meyer, should be  considered neither superior nor subservient to the nonhuman  natural world, but interdependent with it. In the final  chapter, he shows how struggles over toxic waste dumps in  poor neighborhoods, land use in the American West, and  rainforest protection in the Amazon illustrate this  relationship and point toward an environmental politics  that recognizes the experience of place as central.},
      url = {http://library.usi.edu/record/1386083},
}