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Through the examination of Eco‐feminism and Deep Ecology, it is demonstrated how many in these two schools have misused the concept of ‘environment’ and caused a confusion that has been detrimental to the social and political status of environmental philosophy. It is argued that when putting forward political goals that are legitimate and justified, but not ‘environmental’ at all, they have ‘conceptually exploited’ the ‘environment’. The reasons for environmental philosophy's lack of popularity among politicians and activists are (1) that it fails to distinguish between meta‐ethics and political theory, (2) that it identifies goals that do not necessarily appeal to environmentalists, and (3) that it overextended the use of its main concepts and caused confusion and vagueness.

This chapter takes up the perspective of poor women in two-thirds of the world, out of the conviction that we will not understand prosperity without addressing the ethics and economics of poverty. It explores the global gender gap and the effects of economic policies on women. It describes the approach of ecofeminism in the work of Ivone Gerbara and examines some existing programs of solidarity and empowerment. It evaluates the situation of Latin American women working in maquilas with help of ecofeminist analysis and the work of Amartya Sen.

An examination is made of Rosemary Radford Ruether's naturalist moral realism, whose naturalist, ecofeminist ethic locates both God (divine presence) and human norms in natural processes, particularly in evolution. Transcendence of immediate context and experience is possible through conscious participation in natural evolutionary development into the future. Ruether's moral realism is evident in her confidence that humans can know the good by looking to nature, including human nature, and this same confidence makes her an idealist about the potential to eliminate domination by creating new selves, theologies, and social structures. Moreover, Ruether's description of normative human nature focuses on boundedness to nature and the self's unique faculty of consciousness as an expression of nature; it does not include the human capacity for radical transcendence of or freedom over nature and consciousness. Thus, it is argued, Ruether offers grounding for moral norms in her naturalist moral realism, but she lacks a mechanism to judge those norms and to account for the resilience of human sin and the potential of human creativity to transmute nature.

The theocentrism of H. Richard Niebuhr, especially his understanding of value, is uniquely helpful in addressing the problem of value construction and negotiation involved in the debate over MTR. The author first examines several alternative ethical perspectives and shows that, although they offer important insights, none is sufficiently attuned to its own methodological presuppositions to allow Appalachian intertextuality to “speak for itself.” The perspectives considered—ecofeminism, liberation theology, environmental justice, environmental pragmatism, and political ecology—are promising, in that they all seek, on some level, to understand and address the power of the social discourses that define an ostensibly environmental issue like MTR. After considering the strengths and weaknesses of each in relation to MTR and Appalachia in particular, the author turns more directly to the question of values to examine this inadequacy more clearly. He concludes that Niebuhr’s relational theory of value offers the most accurate and helpful foundation for an ethical approach to MTR, one that is capable of relativizing fundamental assumptions and thereby founding a thorough critique of the discourses that surround the issue.

In the academy, the so-called Science Wars of the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s were waged largely by those on the left who were interested in the theories and findings of the several disciplines in which historical, philosophical, political, and sociological science studies are pursued. These radical critics equated scientific knowledge with power, but made an exception for ecology, which they saw as utopian because they too readily accepted the popular view of ecology as holistic and communitarian, and therefore as radically unlike physics, which has long set the standard for reductive and mechanistic views of nature as well as for objectivity and certainty. Radical critics of science have no faith in the latter, believing instead in the social construction of scientific knowledge, and asserting that the goal of most scientific research and experimentation is the domination of nature. Their confidence in theories of social construction leads them to treat science as just one form of discourse among others, and to dismiss disciplines like sociobiology and genetics as politically suspect. But many of these critics of science — who are variously influenced by Critical Theory, cultural studies, ecofeminism, and so-called social ecology — seem blithely to accept sociological determinism (which would appear to be just as onerous as any other form of determinism) and seem to misunderstand scientific realism, which is a realism not about theories or “discourses” but about entities which cannot be understood as mere effects of meaning or artifacts of signification.

The story of how The Globe (1599) was rebuilt from the reused oak timbers of The Theatre (1576) is well known. Less familiar is the environmental crisis that prompted this thrifty recycling. Shakespeare’s company, the Chamberlain’s Men, were in danger of losing The Theatre because the lease had expired. The landlord, Giles Allen, was threatening to pull down the playhouse and put its wood and timber to other uses. The leaseholders, Richard and Cuthbert Burbage, got there before him because a clause in the original agreement made them owners of the building on Allen’s land. In the lead-up to their stealthy dismantling of The Theatre on the icy morning of 28 December 1598, when Allen was away celebrating Christmas in the country, each side had been eyeing the valuable timber and wood. Its reuse was the lynchpin of a deal between the Burbages and five actor-sharers of the Chamberlain’s Men, including Shakespeare, for building The Globe: the brothers offered to supply the main materials if the sharers contributed to the lesser expenses of construction and maintenance. The Burbages had spent their savings on building an indoor theatre at Blackfriars two years before. Although it had begun to pay them rent, they could not afford to buy new materials because the price of wood and timber had risen 96 per cent over the quarter century since The Theatre had been built. This inflation was the result of southern English woodlands being deforested. Ancient English woodland and forests had been shrinking throughout the middle ages. By Henry VIII’s time the pace began to accelerate. Worried about timber supplies for shipbuilding, the government took the first steps—largely ineffective—to manage depletions. Climactic and demographic pressures aggravated overexploitation, and by the 1590s caused a fuel crisis in south-east England and the country’s first major environmental controversy. Similar to the threat of warming global temperatures today, the stresses on southern English woodland—at that time the country’s most essential but finite natural resource—reached an ecological turning point. A solution was in the offing, but it was a highly ambivalent one.

Having made jibes at Orlando’s love-verses and drawn defensive reactions from Rosalind, Touchstone gently reproves her by appealing to nature as a third party: ‘You have said; but whether wisely or no, let the forest judge’ (3.2.117–18). Thinking ecocritically, we might hear in his advice an anticipation of Aldo Leopold’s landmark book, A Sand County Almanac (1949). Leopold redefined ecological ethics by reading his local Wisconsin landscape for signs of its biodiversity, whose value he asserted independent of its economic and social utility. He also encouraged readers to think about reciprocity and fairness in their dealings with the environments and resources they share with non-human life. Jaques’s viewpoint in As You Like It is hardly as self-disinterested as that of a forest. Yet he captures the essence of Leopold’s biocentric principles by reminding Oliver that the trees into which he has thoughtlessly, if romantically, carved his verses are entitled to their own physical integrity (3.2.251–52). Leopold’s outlook inspired the later movement, bioregionalism, which looks to identification with a landscape’s terrain, climate, and biota, or collective plant and animal life, as the basis for resistance to environmental damage caused by distant political authorities and transnational economies. In conceiving environments as ‘life-territories’ with natural rights that extend beyond those of human culture, Leopold invited people to imagine cooperative attachments to regional modes of subsistence and dwelling. Arden and surrounding Warwickshire were the life-territory where Shakespeare learned to think bioregionally. Whereas his knowledge of Windsor in Merry Wives came from passing acquaintance, his sensitivity to Arden’s place-attachments was both deeply personal and critically detached, and he integrated both perspectives into As You Like It. Topographic and social contouring of Warwickshire’s historically changing terrains dramatically heightens the visibility of Arden’s early modern bio-relations. I’ll begin exploring these by considering how Shakespeare gave his dramatic adaptation of Thomas Lodge’s prose romance Rosalynde (1590) a distinctive environmental profile. In doing so, Shakespeare created an ecological meta-commentary on Lodge’s popular forest romance.

The disputed land-uses and cultivation practices represented in As You Like It responded to unprecedented changes in Elizabethan climate, population, and economic relations. Traditional modes of rural dwelling were no longer protected by virtue of their rural isolation or autonomy, but were becoming inescapably tied to national and global orders of competitive growth and resource exploitation. Perhaps the most disruptive of these modernizing turns was the development of gunpowder technologies and the armament industry. As in other western European countries, military culture became ubiquitous in England by the late sixteenth century as a result of innovations in gunpowder weapons and the formation of national armies. During the Middle Ages, low-tech weaponry and feudal mobilization had limited the social and environmental impacts of war. This situation began to change from the fifteenth century onwards with the development of far more deadly cannons, mines, and firearms. Influenced partly by the Erasmian ethics of his Humanist education (like Queen Elizabeth and King James in their attitudes to war), Shakespeare drew attention to gunpowder’s devastating effects on human and non-human animals and their environments in virtually all his history plays and several of his tragedies, even thoughmost of these references were anachronistic. By layering historical and contemporary viewpoints he registered changing material realities and cultural assumptions about the ecology of war: from self-regulating cycles of martial destruction and agrarian regeneration, to incremental technological mastery reliant on ever-increasing resource consumption. Traditional ideas about redeeming war through cultivation are captured by the Virgilian image of beating swords into ploughshares. It suggests that peacetime cultivation will heal wartime damage, and that periods of war and peace routinely alternate. The swordsinto-ploughshares trope also encodes temporal assumptions that the arc of catastrophe, in its political, ecological, and dramatic senses, is limited in scope and ultimately reversible. In this chapter I want to examine the emerging gunpowder regime putting pressure on this paradigm, and replacing it with modern structures of recoiling environmental risk and planetary push-back, represented in Henry IV Part Two and Macbeth respectively.

Women's relationship with the environment is complex and replete with dualities in ways that are often little recognized in the linear narratives about gender and the environment which dominate the literature. Women face opposing pulls from their survival needs and their interest in conservation. Gender and class differences in the extent and nature of dependence on the forest can lead to both co-operation and conflict between women and men, and between the well-off and the poor. Also, notwithstanding their interest in forest conservation, women are not always free to pursue that interest. This chapter explores these complexities and how they could play out in gendered responses to forest governance. It outlines the need for a feminist environmentalist perspective, as opposed to an ecofeminist perspective, and critically examines whether there is any basis for assuming that women are more conservationist or more co-operative than men.

Coined in 1974 by Françoise d'Eaubonne, the term ‘ecofeminism’ refers to the radical environmentalism that incorporates both ecological and feminist concerns. Emerging from the global feminist movement of the 1970s, ecofeminism has since incorporated a wide range of contexts, from historical and political to religious, literary, ethical, empirical, conceptual, epistemological, methodological, and theoretical. According to Val Plumwood, the theory of ecofeminism results from the application of feminist perspectives to problems of ecology, and is therefore as complex and diverse as feminism itself. This chapter examines modern social ecofeminism (nonessentialist) and cultural ecofeminism (essentialist) in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's utopian 1915 novel Herland. In particular, it discusses the struggle between the ‘forest’ and the ‘desert’ within the novel's utopian vision.

Chapter four moves beyond context to critique how concepts such as protection are used to justify inequitable practices and social relations to demonstrate how narrative legitimates destructive interventions and normalizes hierarchical social relations, particularly gender relations. It explores the gendered dimensions of agriculture to see how these emerge in actual practice. The presumed need for protection can be a slippery slope towards control and domination, so merits conscious reflection on how this need is assessed and why narratives of need are told and retold. In addition to critique, however, this chapter asks how—with conscious reflection—concepts such as reciprocity, obligation, and even protection might become the foundation for revised relations in the biotic community.

Rebecca Laroche and Jennifer Munroe offer innovative approaches to teaching the embodied and collective history of human impact on the planet through early modern texts and contemporary ecofeminist theory. Combining Rob Nixon’s concept of “slow violence” (a way to understand environmental destruction over long periods of time) with an ecofeminist approach that “interrogates mutual forms of subjugation,” the authors stress how humans inhabit collective environments with other human and nonhuman entities. Their intersectional teaching strategy reflects this attitude by elevating collaborative scholarship, forging links between distinct classroom communities, and empowering students to historicize environmental problems, from water quality to wildfires. Students collaborate across geographic and institutional differences, and with scholarly efforts like the Early Modern Recipes Online Collective, to develop a heightened sense of both place and global interconnectedness.

For many Americans, the insights of general systems theory implied a validation of traditional Native American ideas, which posited a spirit immanent in material nature, unlike the scientific discourses of Western modernity. Referred to in environmentalist, ecofeminist, and neo-pagan discourse as a “reverence” toward nature, the traditional Native American viewpoint was equated with an empathetic wisdom that Western civilization had sacrificed in its pursuit of a scientific knowledge that promised to predict, manipulate, and otherwise transcend nature. This chapter explores how such perceptions of Native American spirituality were promulgated through popular culture, and what their implications were, both for non–Native Americans who saw themselves as adopting traditional Native American beliefs, and for American Indians themselves. The chapter includes close readings of texts by the Keep America Beautiful campaign, filmmaker Carroll Ballard, nature writer Farley Mowat, professional tracker Tom Brown, the Mohawk newspaper Akwesasne Notes, and American Indian activist Vine Deloria, Jr.

Ecofeminism emerged in the late 20th century as a major school of philosophical and theological thought and social analysis. Ecofeminism sees an interconnection between the domination of women and the domination of nature. This interconnection is typically made on two levels: ideological-cultural and socioeconomic. This chapter surveys several ecofeminist perspectives that are emerging from a number of religious and cultural contexts—those of Vandana Shiva from India, Ivone Gebara from Brazil, and Carolyn Merchant, a North American historian of science. It concludes with some questions about the utility of this effort to interconnect the domination of women and of nature, social justice, and ecological health.

This chapter analyses the critical role of spirituality in the human relationship with nature. Different forms of connection (nature as sacred in itself, nature as the word of God, nature “spirits”) are described as are the particular experiences and virtues to which our connection to nature gives rise. The difference between traditional senses of nature and the contemporary sense of ‘environment’—nature assaulted and wounded by humanity—is discussed. The particular relevance of indigenous and ecofeminist spirituality is stressed, as are the social questions of needed ecological change. The chapter concludes by questioning the relation between love of nature and love of people; what can be considered a reasonable level of consumption; and what happens to our concept of the sacred when the sacred is vulnerable and poisoned.