Chinnagounder's Challenge

Deane Curtin is Raymong and Florence Sponberg Chair of Ethics and Professor of Philosophy at Gustavus Adolphus College. He is co-editor of Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food (Indiana University Press). He has lived and taught in India, Japan, and Italy and has published on deep ecology, ecofeminism, and contemporary Gandhian resistance to development.

• Preliminary Table of Contents: Preface and AcknowledgmentsPart 1. Nature and Culture: Living at the Margins1. Turning South2. The British Utilitarians and the Invention of the "Third World"3. War and Peace: The Politics of Agricultural "Modernization"4. Gandhian Legacies: Indigenous Resistance to "Development" in Contemporary India and Mexico5. Recognizing Women's Environmental ExpertisePart 2: Radical First World Environmental Philosophy: A New Colonialism?6. Callicott's Land Ethic7. A State of Mind Like Water: Ecosophy T and the Buddhist Traditions8. Ecological Feminism and the Place of CaringPart 3. Democratic Pluralism9. Democractic Discourse in a Morally Pluralistic World10. Putting Down Roots: Ecocommunities and the Practice of FreedomNotesReferences

"Curtin (philosophy, Gustavus Adolphus College) offers an important contribution to environmental philosophy. Though concerned with proposing an American environmental ethic, he shows that such an ethic requires an intercultural context. On a research trip to India, Curtin met a centenarian, Chinnagounder, who told of environmental displacement and economic upheaval by Western developers and planters. Finding the dominant Western proposals for environmental ethics misguided, especially regarding the intrinsic/extrinsic value-of-nature question, Curtin argues that though Western social values appear just from within, they may produce grave injustice when exported. Ethics, he thinks, especially environmental ethics, must emerge in situ, through attachment to place. In developing his theory, Curtin makes excellent use of McIntyre's concept of a practice as including internal goods not reducible to external values. The consequent moral pluralism is not cultural relativism; rather, Curtin proposes a critical ecocommunitarianism, issuing from a substantive relationship with nature but recognizing the need to face criticism from within and without. Just that clarification of what pluralism might mean makes the book worthwhile, but Curtin also includes provocative discussions of institutional and systemic violence, indigenous resistance to development, the land ethic, deep ecology, ecofeminism, women's ecological knowledge, Jeffersonian agrarian republicanism, Berry's ideas about principled engagement in community, wilderness advocacy, and the need for an attachment to place. Upper—division undergraduates through professionals.June 2000"—W. Ouderkirk, SUNY Empire State College