Below are links to and brief descriptions of the books in which I develop my integral and expansive approach to ecology.
The Coming Ecological Revolution, 2011 217,295 words
The Coming Ecological Revolution is an analysis of the changes in politics and society likely to come in light of a growing environmental crisis. The book therefore conceives the ecological transformation of the political and the political transformation of ecology to be twin process. When these things come to be separated and opposed to one another, an anti-human, anti-democratic necessity ensures.
Of Gods and Gaia: Men as Gods Gambling with Gaia. 2012 399,440 words
Of Gods and Gaia is a wide-ranging critique of the eco-modernization which is being presented as a pragmatic alternative to a ‘utopian,’ ‘radical,’ and ‘political’ Green agenda. The book first examines the case for planetary engineering and management, before setting the ‘pragmatic’ anti-politics of the eco-modernizers within a broader philosophical discussion of human power and progress. Planetary engineering is revealed to be an intensification of our utilitarian interchange with Nature, not a transformation of it. Against this, the author argues for the integration of our moral and technical capacities so as to achieve a mutual and balanced unfolding between the social and natural metabolisms.
Re-inheriting the Disinherited Life 64,450 words
In these essays of environmental reconstruction, I explore an expansive conception of the environment by drawing on the likes of Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, and Heidegger. In the process I show the extent to which environmental crisis is embedded in culture, language, and practices, all of which view nature in certain ways.
Seeking to identify an underlying philosophy to support the environmentalism we need in the contemporary age, I argue the need to go beyond naturalism, scientism, and reductionism by embracing an animate and purposeful reality. This reality, I show, is something incarnated in local life. Only by re-inheriting and re-inhabiting the world to find the purpose and meaning at its core will humanity come to eschew fight and flight to finally to be at home.
Ecological Humanism 2016 40,585 words
Essays on philosophy, life, and the environment, in search of the world beyond rationalisation, abstraction, distortion, and distraction.
The Economics of Flourishing Well. 2016 88,877 words
This book is a collection of essays on the theme of economics, ethics, happiness and the virtues. The title derives from the Aristotelian conception of 'happiness' (Eudaimonia) as 'flourishing.' The essays seek the grounding of our productive interchange with the world in the moral economy.
The book opens with a concise presentation of the virtues, going on to discuss the emphasis on the virtues in the work of E.F. Schumacher, R.H. Tawney, Lewis Mumford, and Alasdair MacIntyre. From there, the book examines the views of Adam Smith and Karl Marx from a moral and ecological angle, casting the economics of both thinkers in new light. Having thus laid the ethical and philosophical foundations, the final half of the book sets out the case for the Green economy in terms of commoning, socially-useful production, and real growth within the cooperative commonwealth.
Sensible Transcendence: Cultivating a Morality of the Senses, 2023 57,190 words
Sensible Transcendence is a collection of essays which are concerned to develop the idea of what it is to be alive within the sensuous ecology of the world.The book is an exploration of the sometimes contradictory, but ultimately intimate, human connection with the rest of nature.Beginning with Rousseau's ‘morality of the senses’ and going on to discuss the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, the book develops an eco-phenomenology which advances a dynamic inter-relationalism in place of a mechanistic materialism.The essays weave together ecology, poetry, and philosophy to develop a living philosophy, based on a falling in love outward in which we become aware of the aliveness of life. Addressing the pervasive longing for meaning and fulfilment in time of crisis, Sensible Transcendence advances an eco-phenomenology that reveals how we can fully and creatively flourish through a sensuous appreciation of the world.
Comments