Jedediah Purdy is Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law at Duke University School of Law.
Dazzling… [Purdy’s] book is, among other things, a panoramic tour
of what he calls the ‘American environmental imagination.’ …Purdy
hopes that climate change might spur yet another change in how we
think about the natural world, but he insists that such a shift
will be inescapably political… For a relatively slim volume, this
book distills an incredible amount of scholarship—about Americans’
changing attitudes toward the natural world, and about how those
attitudes might change in the future.
*The Atlantic*
For Purdy, one of the key challenges of the Anthropocene is to use
the law in ways that adopt the best rather than the worst of each
vision of nature: to integrate concern for human work and meaning
into an ecological framework; to set standards for action on
climate change; to make transparent the sources of our food and our
treatment of animals…Purdy thinks we need to learn the core
political lesson of his story—which at its heart is not about the
politics of nature, but about democracy. This is a history in which
democracy is constantly evaded, decision-making is removed from
collective politics by appeals to ‘natural systems,’ and
anti-politics creeps back in.
*The Nation*
Jedediah Purdy has written a big book, taking up a set of profound
environmental questions and offering sweeping answers… The
strengths of After Nature are significant and make this a must-read
book for all who are struggling with how to reinvigorate
environmental protection in the face of political breakdown in
America and troubling global trends, including the emerging risk of
climate change… The journey he maps is illuminating. In fact,
perhaps the greatest strength of After Nature is its intellectual
history of American environmentalism… With this book, Purdy shows
himself to be a deep thinker on the nature of Nature… Purdy offers
a provocative ecological vision and ethical argument that deserves
to be reckoned with. He has established himself among the top tier
of environmental philosophers of our day.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
After Nature argues that we will deserve the future only because it
will be the one we made. We will live, or die, by our mistakes.
*Harper’s*
After Nature takes the reader on a smart and eloquent tour of the
history of conservation movements, the rise of the study of ecology
(and its flourishing in the wake of the Vietnam War) and the
gradual expansion of environmental law, but Purdy is at his most
insightful and persuasive when writing about the first of his
‘major realms,’ economy—and the subtle ways money has been shaping
nature for centuries to suit its own needs… In the previous year,
there’ve been many studies of the deeper meaning of the
Anthropocene and the future of humanity, studies ranging from the
impenetrable to the inconsolable. After Nature is by a wide margin
the best of these books; in its passion, intelligence, and
persistent thread of hope, it may very well be the Silent Spring of
the 21st century.
*Open Letters Monthly*
Offers a powerful reckoning with our bewildering present… Its great
value lies in its sophisticated, lucid study of the evolving
American environmental imagination. Purdy…brings impressive
intellectual and literary chops to bear on a history of American
attitudes toward nature, and how those attitudes have manifested in
tangible modifications of the air, land, and water… The book aims
to show how our shared philosophical premises inform our laws, our
behavior, and ultimately our world.
*Los Angeles Review of Books*
[Purdy] argues that our democracy is too beholden to the influence
of money, that the processes we use to produce energy and food
should be made more transparent to the public, and that
technological solutions are unreliable and will not bring about the
greater change of consciousness that is necessary to solve our most
pressing problems. He urges an ethic of self-restraint and a new
worldview in which human beings are no longer ‘the figure at its
center.’
*New York Review of Books*
A profound vision of post-humanistic ethics.
*Kirkus Reviews*
It’s good to have as powerful a mind as Professor Purdy’s taking on
these questions so central to our modern life. Every page has
insights that will help people struggling to understand how we got
here and where we’re headed.
*Bill McKibben, author of The End of Nature*
Deeply considered and finely laid out… To begin reading it is to
open and decipher a compressed and encrypted file on a history of
ideas about what nature means at the heart of the Anthropocene.
Purdy draws on law, letters, philosophy, science, social science,
politics, and aesthetics; from Locke, Rousseau, and Burke, through
Jefferson, all the way to the recent past of the ecological age’s
beginnings, the urgent catastrophe of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
(1962), and our contemporary moment, after ‘crisis had become the
normal state of affairs,’ closing with ideas about nature and the
posthuman from Rosi Braidotti, among others. Somewhere in between,
Purdy manages to give a history of private property—how ‘each
version of nature has its economy.’ If the ominous political near
past and the planet’s environmental emergency feel present on every
page, so, too, does a sense of the role we each have in shaping the
future.
*Artforum*
After Nature is the book that finally, somehow, manages to get the
whole of our environment in its head—to see the multiplicity of its
expressions; of our influence; of our capacity, now, to determine
the fate of the whole world—and from all of that draws out an
account of political possibilities that, for all their sense of
danger, are not without plausible hope.
*Bookforum*
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