Interpreting Nature: The Emerging Field of Environmental Hermeneutics

Modern environmentalism has come to realize that many of its key concerns--"wilderness" and "nature" among them--are contested territory, viewed differently by different people. Understanding nature requires science and ecology, to be sure, but it also requires a sensitivity to history, culture, and narrative. Thus, understanding nature is a fundamentally hermeneutic task.

Author: Forrest Clingerman, Brian Treanor, Martin Drenthen
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 11/11/2013
Pages: 400
Binding Type: Hardcover
Weight: 1.45lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.10w x 1.20d
ISBN: 9780823254255

Review Citation(s):
Choice 07/01/2014

About the Author
Brian Treanor (Author)
Brian Treanor is Professor of Philosophy and Director of Environmental Studies at Loyola Marymount University. He is the author of Aspects of Alterity (Fordham, 2006) and Emplotting Virtue (SUNY Press, 2014), and the coeditor of A Passion for the Possible (Fordham University Press, 2010), Interpreting Nature (Fordham University Press, 2013), and Being-in-Creation (Fordham University Press, 2015). Current projects include the development of an "earthy" hermeneutics, and a monograph on the experience of joy.

Martin Drenthen (Author)
Martin Drenthen is associate professor of philosophy at Radboud University Nijmegen (The Netherlands). He is the author of Old World and New World Pespective in Environmental Philosophy. Together with Jozef Keulartz and Jim Proctor, he coedited New Visions of Nature: Complexity and Authenticity. In English and Dutch publications, he has written about the significance of Nietzsche's critique of morality for environmental ethics, the concept of wildness in debates on ecological restoration, and ethics of place. His most recent research focuses on the relationship between landscapes, cultures of place, and moral identity.

David Utsler (Author)
David Utsler is a PhD candidate at the University of North Texas in the Department of Philosophy and Religion Studies. His current areas of research focus on hermeneutics, critical theory, and their application to environmental philosophy. He has published essays in environmental hermeneutics and presented several conference papers on environmental hermeneutics and environmental justice. He is currently working on a manuscript (along with Robert Melchior Figueroa of UNT) on the application of hermeneutics to environmental justice studies and activism.