Against humanism ii

Evolution

pp. 101-118

in: Mark Rowlands, Jo Campling, The environmental crisis, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2000

Abstract

The task of the remainder of this book is to develop a radical approach towards understanding the value of nature. In common with the radical approaches of Callicott examined in Chapter 5, it will be argued that the question of the value of nature is ill-conceived as a question of whether this value is objective or subjective, since this makes sense only if we accept the traditional distinction between mind and world. It is this opposition that the present and the following chapters seek to break down. To this end, then, these chapters develop a generalised form of the externalism outlined in the previous chapter. Or, they develop, as I, prefer to call it, an environmentalist model of the mind. This model dismantles the traditional mind/world distinction, and does so without appeal to, indeed in opposition to, the tired humanist idea that mind constitutes world, an idea which, I have argued, is anathema to genuine environmental thinking.