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A recurring concept in environmental hermeneutics is environmental identity. Philosophical hermeneutics teaches us that in interpreting the world about oneself, one contemporaneously interprets oneself. Interpretation and self-interpretation are co-extensive. Understanding this hermeneutical phenomenon in the light of environmental issues, it is called “environmental identity.” This essay explores the concept of environmental identity in relationship to the discipline of environmental psychology and the therapeutic practices of eco-psychology. The purpose is to enrich the understanding of the concept of environmental identity to the benefit each of these respective fields through an interdisciplinary dialogue. Further, this essay argues that the use of environmental identity in environmental psychology and eco-psychology are instances of an “environmental hermeneutic of the self.” The conceptual and practical tools provided by environmental hermeneutics, therefore, can help further develop these other areas.

Kyle Whyte, Ryan Gunderson, and Brett Clark compare and contrast the notion of insidiousness in the philosophy of technology and environmental philosophy, the idea that the adoption of a new technology erodes intimate relationships with the environment. The authors reject the idea that technologies are neutral or disinterested but instead embody values, preferences, and lifestyles. The authors argue that technologies can indeed sometimes transform our social and environmental relationships in insidious ways. They conclude with five questions philosophers and social scientists should consider when examining different technology-society-environment interfaces: 1) What social and social-environmental relations give rise a technology and how does it reproduce or transform these relations? 2) Who is in control of the design and application of the given technology? 3) How is the given technology governed? Which social groups and environments benefit from it? 4) Which social groups and environments are harmed by it? 5) Which values, interests, and politics are reflected in the design an application of the given technology? The answers to these questions may not determine that technology is insidious but they will likely counter the view that it is neutral and disinterested.

Environmental philosophy has ignored the holy beauty that should be its starting point. The Byzantine icon shows how to approach this numinous beauty that the earth harbors, and this is argued through several parallels. First, both icon and earth are inherently material. Second, both are non-mimetic, presenting realities beyond themselves rather than representing them. Third, both icon and earth are transactional and interactional, disclosing themselves not to detached inspection but to meaningful interaction. Fourth, while the icon presents a face, so too does nature face us. Five, both are contextual, requiring contextual narratives to become meaningful and intelligible. Six, when grasped noetically or contemplatively, both icon and earth present a vision of paradise, displaying divine energy or activity (energeia). Contrary to Lynn White’s critique, environmental problems came not from Christian thinking, but from our rejection of traditional Christianity, which sought to merge heaven and earth, the visible and the invisible.

This essay develops an interpretive structure through which to understand the temporal dimension of place. Nature can be encountered hermeneutically through the concept of place; narratives of place serve as starting points for interpreting environments. The idea of the narrative self is a complementary concept: just as one encounters places as having a narrative dimension, the places that one finds oneself impact and change the story of that defines self-identity. In response to this relationship between place and self, this essay argues for a new understanding of time for environmental philosophy, focusing on a dialectical relationship between the “time of place” and the “place of time.” The temporality of place is discovered through our memory of the past presence of place. Likewise, the present uncovers the future of a place through the possibilities explored in the imagination. Together, memory and imagination suggest that places hold a deep sense of time, contrary to the temporal shallowness we sometimes experience.

This essay takes the form of a sketch of the rough outlines of a critical environmental hermeneutics. The author applies hermeneutics, narrative theory, and critical theory to environmental ethics, and uses this hermeneutical theory as a method to illuminate the “deep” underlying issues relating to the perception and use of forests. In applying this method, the author first takes up the analytical problem of identifying, clarifying, and ordering the different interpretive narratives about forests in terms of the underlying epistemological, ethical, and political issues involved. He then addresses the critical problem of deciding conflicts between these different interpretations of forests by working out a set of legitimation criteria to which all parties concerned would ideally be able to subscribe.

Philosopher Steven Vogel has defended a compelling social constructivist claim: that post-Cartesian and post-structuralist suspicions force us to develop an environmental philosophy without the concept of nature. The author concedes most of Vogel’s arguments while attempting to avoid his conclusion. The author argues that we should jettison the familiar concept of nature, yet we need a suitably modified version to illuminate the shared world that is— in some sense— really independent of us. To show how this is possible, we’ll detour through Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. As Gadamer shows with concepts like “language” and “world,” so also with “nature”: a sufficiently concrete look at the way that concepts are continually reconstructed can capture the way that words present the world “in itself.”

J. Baird Callicott questions the basic premise of Lynn White Jr.’s essay “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis,” where White attributes the environmental crisis to Genesis where God created man in his image, gave man dominion over the rest of creation, and commands him to subdue the Earth. Callicott examines White’s very epistemic assumption: that what we do depends on what we think. On this reckoning, we need to rethink the nature of nature, human nature, and the relationship between humans and nature in order to save the world from ecological disaster. But Callicott reminds us that the Lynn White Jr. of Medieval Technology and Social Change (1962) also proposes a theory of technological determinism to explain the fate of the West. So which is it? Is the mechanistic worldview of Descartes and Newton the product of Christian theology or mechanical technologies? Perhaps nature is more affected by things than ideas. If so, environmental philosophers have to give up the pretense that they alone can save the world from environmental destruction because they alone are expert at uncovering underlying conceptual presuppositions. Revolutionary developments in real material things are just as important as revolutionary ideas.

This essay applies Marion’s notion of the “saturated phenomenon” to natural phenomena and suggests that they might be interpreted as “saturated” in Marion’s sense. The essay also insists that such phenomena require interpretation, therefore providing a critique of some aspects of Marion’s project. The author draws out the implications of what it might mean to interpret phenomena of nature as saturated and how this might help address certain concerns in environmental philosophy, in particular setting this paper in relationship with other issues raised in the same volume.

Although the power of narrative is often underestimated, stories play a powerful role in determining both what we value and in shaping our understanding. Because narrative gives us an “as if” experience of things, it can substitute for direct experience of wild places and so induce us to care for them. Similarly, narrative supports the theoretical understanding of science, helping us to see more truly— not by replacing scientific insight with narrative fancy, but by supplementing science with the insights of experience and imagination. For example, while science can give us facts about reality, it has nothing to say about meaning or value. Direct experience does not give us a complete account of how we come to value things, and acts and data do not give us a complete account of all aspects of reality. Both need to be supplemented by narrative insights.

If we appreciate the way that organisms and environments mutually specify one another at multiple scales, we need to carefully consider the ways biological phenomena generate communities within the surrounding worlds and how, in turn, the emergent individual and social life worlds co-generate the Umwelts within which they belong. This essay reflects on the biological-linguistic basis from which self-organizing and built environments, as well as our own embodied consciousness, emerge. Rather than only investigating the usual phenomenal realm of people operating within buildings and landscapes, the author locates our open character as persons within the interactive and continuous layers of the dynamic unfolding of our micro- and macro-environments.

In Ecology without Nature, Timothy Morton breaks with the folksy and somewhat frumpy environmental holism of the ’70s and ’80s, and confirms the growing conviction in continental philosophical circles of a necessary movement beyond phenomenological critiques of calculative science to hypermodern reinscriptions of technological thinking. In this essay, the author argues that Ecology without Nature does not, in fact, challenge the dominant twentieth-century discourse. For Morton, any experience of nature as organic whole, the universe of meaning, can only be the result of a substitution of a psycho-genetically structured totality for the material chaos of the universe. The authors makes a case for questioning Morton’s rejection of “premodern” cosmology and argues for a reconsideration of alternative models of material interdependence. The author discusses one model central to the Renaissance philosophy of nature, hermetic holism, which offers us a strong theory of interdependence but does not implicate us in a posthuman meta-narrative.

E.O. Wilson’s sociobiology presents a view of natural history that universalizes science at the cost of a viable ethics and politics of nature. In contrast, Gadamer’s hermeneutic ontology suggests that the universalization of hermeneutic consciousness offers us another perspective. This hermeneutical perspective suggests a richer, self-conscious view of history, rather than an ahistorical scientific stance embodied by Wilson and others. Gadamer also acknowledges a sense of incompleteness and finitude that are absent in Wilson’s totalizing perspective. Hermeneutics, then, allows our dialogue about nature to properly value ethics and politics without absolutizing the scientific perspective.

This essay investigates the claims that the genius loci of a place is determined as much by the formal properties of a place as the “mood” that is carried into it and that the interpretation of an environment is primarily bodily rather than cognitive. This investigation is focuses on the phenomenology of agoraphobia. Spatial anxiety is demonstrative of how our experience of the world depends as much on the objective features of the world as it does the bodily mood with which we interpret these features. The epistemic advantage of agoraphobia is that it foregrounds themes that are otherwise tacit: the contingency of boundaries, the vulnerability of home, and the unfamiliarity of our experience of the world. The question raised through this investigation is the role of the body and bodily experience in defining the character of environments.

Don Ihde examines the “congenital dystopianism” shared by environmentalists, environmental philosophers, and philosophers of technology. Each group employs a “rhetoric of alarm” that connects the use of technologies with environmental degradations. Ihde calls attention to how excessive rhetorical strategies have locked us into a false dichotomy: either technological-environmental utopianism or dystopianism. The problem is that we have not yet fully diagnosed either what our technologies can or should do, or what the environmental crises actually are. So long as we continue to accept either utopian or dystopian forecasts we are unlikely to bring either technologies or ecosystems into appropriate focus. Techno-environmental problems are complex, ambiguous, and interwoven; they rarely lend themselves either to an easy techno-fix or simple solution. The hardest problem of them all is how to turn major actors in the economy green: large scale development projects and multinational corporations. The challenge for a proactive philosopher is to get on the ground floor of technological research and development in order to help figure out how to green the economy itself.

This essay distinguishes space from place, pursuing the thought that it is via temporality, especially history, that place is distinct from space. If the hermeneutics of place begins with one’s body, where does it end? Is one’s “place in the sun” one’s existential right to exist, or does it extend, perhaps in a Lockean fashion, to property and possession in which labour and meaning are mixed? The meaning of place is in part a narrative construction. Places have histories, contested histories, and they contain their past in a way that anticipates the future. This claim survives our moving away from a naïve naturalistic understanding of the past to one constructed and constituted so as to include narrative, intentions, and projections even when these form the basis for serious contestation of what we take to be the past.