Thinking Like a Planet: The Land Ethic and the Earth Ethic 1st Edition

“Thinking Like a Planet” aids our self-awareness within the material human condition. Humanity and nature have interpenetrating identies. Callicott furnishes extensive philosophical commentary to build an authentic context for understanding.

J. Baird Callicott is one of the founders of environmental ethics, having taught the world's first course on the subject. He is also the leading interpreter of Aldo Leopold's land ethic, which is one of the most essential normative paradigms in environmental philosophy, and a founder of comparative environmental philosophy, which takes into account both Eastern and Western perspectives on environmental ethics and aesthetics. This book represents the most mature version of Callicott's philosophy, which expands his defense of Leopold's land ethic to a new "earth ethic" that is larger in scope and more dynamic in application. As always, Callicott builds his normative framework upon a strong environmental science foundation. This book is clearly written and features a coherent, systematic exposition of Callicott's environmental philosophy that will appeal to undergraduates, graduate students, and researchers alike. I plan to use this book the next time I teach Environmental Ethics.

J. Baird Callicott has long been the most prominent expositor and defender of Aldo Leopold's land ethic, the view that we have ethical duties to ecological wholes, such as species and ecosystems, and that humans should consider themselves "plain members and citizens" of earth's community of life, rather than rulers or exploiters of it. Recognizing that the land ethic is more suited to localized environmental issues, such as land use, than to global ecological problems, such as climate change, Callicott seeks to extend the land ethic into a more encompassing earth ethic. Drawing on hints from Leopold's 1923 essay "Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest," Callicott elaborates and defends a Leopoldian earth ethic that grounds ethical duties to future generations and to the planet as a whole in feelings of community and solidarity with ecosystems, cultural traditions, and other things that lie outside our narrow "selves" but make us the persons that we are.Callicott's book is valuable in in showing how a globalized environmental ethic might be constructed on broadly Leopoldian lines. The book is not well-constructed, however. It's a sprawling book that goes into great detail about many minor matters but becomes quite sketchy when it comes to fleshing out and defending the particular earth ethic Callicott favors. Ultimately, Callicott argues that we should care for the planet as a whole because the planet is part of us, of our extended selves. Similarly, we should care about cultural matters, such as one's nation-state and inherited civilizational values, because they too have made us the persons that we are (p. 295). This claim rests on a dubious and inadequately defended relational view of the self, and threatens to collapse into a kind of moral conventionalism that attaches value to things, not because they are good or right, but because they have shaped us into the persons that we are. Nor is it clear that Callicott's anthropocentric earth ethic can ground any robust respect for nature, because many human-made, artificial things may have done more to shape the persons we are than wolves, redwood trees and other natural objects have done. Callicott asks the right questions but his answers fail to convince.