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This chapter charts the development of ecology as a science and then highlights the cultural and educational significance of this way of thinking. The career of Aldo Leopold is considered in order to show the transformation in thought necessary for a more robust environmentalism. The foundations are also laid for an ecological ethic, a garden aesthetic, and a conversation between religion and ecology around the topic of death.

This chapter talks about “Good” as the original principle of political authority and as a sovereign limit on the exercise of politics. It discusses Plato’s dialogue Critias, which offers an account of the Golden Age where gods are described as shepherds that use persuasion rather than force to guide human flocks. In Critias, Plato implies that the gods steer the whole mortal fabric in a way more suitable to human intelligence and produce from the soil a race of good men, to which the gods taught the order of their polity. The chapter also addresses the questions of ecological ethics and politics and ecological sovereignty through readings of Plato’s works that emphasize critical possibilities of the sovereignty of the Good.

Before exploring the cosmic common good in non-Christian religious traditions, this chapter outlines the methodology of comparative theology, drawing primarily on the work of Francis X. Clooney, S.J., and James Fredericks. Comparative theology is a form of interreligious dialogue that is dialectical, with an interplay between traditions. More than a mere comparison of traditions, comparative theology is a thoroughly theological, constructive, and revisionist project, in which comparison is not tangential but is central to theologizing. Comparison requires a nuanced interpretation both of one’s own tradition and the other. Comparative theology represents the kind of interdependent, global conversation that the ecological crisis demands, so the chapter argues for a comparative ecological ethics in which theologians from various religious traditions dialogue with and learn from each other. The chapter concludes with his choice of interlocutors from Hindu, Buddhist, and American Indian traditions and the principles they have ecologically interpreted from their own traditions.

This chapter outlines the possibilities for rethinking and constituting ecological ethics and politics. It talks about legislative completeness, as the regulative counterpart to the global metastasis of free-market approaches that effectively reduce the world’s diversity to a common currency or a universal, abstract, monetary exchange value. The chapter concludes with a description of the currency of modernism and capitalism as a tangible indicator of the spread of biopolitics, and with an analysis of what “saving the natural world” mean.

This chapter returns to contemporary media narratives about the Arctic to connect the colonial and environmental history of science with the present. It presents a brief history of conflict within the Arctic Council since the mid 1990s. Whereas Inuit advocated community-based science that served the interests of northern residents, U.S. senior officials supported computer-based and remote research that answered theoretical or empirical questions posed by southern scientists. This conflict mirrors the narrative of the book as it hinges on differing interpretations of the relations among knowledge, nature, and power. The chapter then details how lessons from the Arctic’s colonial past can be applied in current environmental decision-making. It is argued that climate scientists and policy-makers must engage in participatory forums at regional levels to build trust and capacity to respond to rapid environmental change. Key to these actions will be a recommitment to principles that were first developed in the 1970s: ecological ethics, social justice, and awareness of the historical legacies present in the Arctic. Historians and concerned citizens must counter simplified ideas of the Arctic proliferating in the press to shift the focus of climate action from the circumpolar basin to the sites where most fossil fuels are burned.