This study gathers classical and contemporary sources into a sweeping examination of the role of politics and political theory in shaping conceptions of nature—and vice versa. Meyer achieves a balanced analysis of the strongest aspects of long-opposed philosophical approaches to the idea of nature.
Mark Sagoff, Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, University of Maryland
Political Nature is a significant contribution to the field. Not enough has been made elsewhere of the major traditions in political theory in the context of contemporary environmental politics, and this book goes a long way toward addressing that problem.
Andrew Dobson, Professor of Politics, Keele University, UK
Both provocative and judicious, Meyer's book makes a most welcome and valuable contribution to current debates about environmentalist political theory and practice.
Terence Ball, Arizona State University, author of Reappraising Political Theory
Political Nature is an important contribution to the growing environmental theory literature. John Meyer presents strong and helpful arguments for why we should be skeptical about the possibility of deriving a political theory from a theory of nature. Insisting that environmental theorists take politics more seriously than they often do, he has added his powerful voice to a growing list of scholars and activists concerned to cultivate a democratic and non-dogmatic environmentalism. This book should play a significant role in encouraging environmentalist theory to develop in a manner consistent with the best of our democratic theory and practice.
Robert Pepperman Taylor, Department of Political Science and Director, John Dewey Honors Program, University of Vermont, author of Our Limits Transgressed: Environmental Political Thought in America
John Meyer deploys considerable theoretical and critical skills in this conceptually clear-headed, innovative examination of contemporary environmentalist thinking. Locating the roots of current environmentalist views in the history of Western political thought, Meyer turns to Hobbes and Aristotle in order to explore the conceptual conundrums, unexamined assumptions and oversimplifications that stalk (historical and contemporary) efforts to articulate meaningfully the relation between nature and politics. The result is an argument admirably schooled in environmental theory and the interpretation of historical texts and a project that carries powerful practical-normative implications for environmental action.
Mary G. Dietz, Professor of Political Science, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
By reconfiguring the relationship between nature and politics in traditional political theory, John M. Meyer has gone a long way toward liberating environmental ethics from the abstractions of meta-ethics and re-placing the study of ethics and environmental values in the context where it belongs—within the give and take of place-based politics of resource use.
Bryan G. Norton, School of Public Policy, Georgia Institute of Technology