2 Neither ‘‘Ethics’’ nor ‘‘Ideology’’
.........................................................................................................................................................................................
A connection between political theory and environmental conditions or
concerns can be traced back at least as far as Aristotle. Nonetheless, a self-
conscious Weld of academic inquiry emerged primarily in the 1990 s. In
the 1970 s and 1980 s, landmark works thatWt this mold were published—
William Ophuls’Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity( 1977 ), Murray Bookchin’s
Ecology of Freedom( 1982 ), and John Dryzek’sRational Ecology( 1987 ), for
example—but there was no larger body of work that spoke to recognizably
political-theoretic concerns. When and where this body of theoretical work
does begin to emerge, it can be diVerentiated both from the academicWeld
of environmental ethicsand from discussions of a political ideology of
‘‘ecologism.’’
The study of ‘‘environmental ethics’’ emerged prominently in the 1970 s; the
initiation of the journal Environmental Ethicsin 1979 reXected a certain
coming of age for the Weld. This body of literature has been the most
identiWable form of normative environmental inquiry over the past gener-
ation. In some instances, at least in the USA, the label ‘‘environmental ethics’’
has been treated as synonymous with normative environmental inquiry itself.
Moreover, in recent years the range of views expressed by ‘‘environmental
ethicists’’ has clearly diversiWed—often in a direction more attentive to the
political concerns discussed below. 3 Nonetheless, a distinction between en-
vironmental political thought and environmental ethics will prove to be a
useful heuristic. In making this distinction, it must be clear that we are
seeking to clarify dominant tendencies within these academicWelds, rather
than to divorce ethics from politics.
Environmental ethics as an academic enterprise tends to focus upon
individual convictions, consciousness, and actions toward the non-human
world, thus suggesting that strategies for change also be located at the
individual level. In this context, political theory is often neglected. When
environmental thinking in this mold does speak to questions of political or
social order, moreover, it has tended toward a certain exuberance. Robyn
Eckersley’sEnvironmentalism and Political Theory, pathbreaking when it was
published in 1992 ,reXects this tendency with its implicit conWdence that
newly adopted environmental values could lead to a new social and political
3 See, especially, work by ‘‘environmental pragmatists’’ including Anthony Weston, Bryan Norton,
Ben Minteer, Andrew Light, and others; Light and Katz ( 1996 ).
political theory and the environment 775