The Idea of the Environment

Summary

This is in part a reflection on issues raised by David Cooper in his paper entitled ‘The Idea of Environment’ (Cooper, 1992), a paper that I have an ambiguous attitude towards. On the one hand it has opened my eyes to a way of thinking about the environment, namely as a field of significance, but on the other hand it seems to be unfortunate in its tone of negative criticism of much of the thinking of deep environmentalists, and wrong in its dismissal of the idea that the environment as a whole should be a field of significance.

Much of my paper will be an attempt to defend the latter possibility, not only as intellectually intelligible but also as morally imperative, given the environmental predicament we are in. But the paper also has a more theoretical aim, namely to argue that the idea of having an environment involves both the aspect of an environment as a field of significance and the aspect of an objective environment out there, independent of our field of significance. The paper is also somewhat programmatic in that if this way of thinking about the environment is fruitful, there is much more to be said.

Cooper's Account

First let me sketch out some of the ideas in Cooper's paper.