ABSTRACT
How should human beings relate to the non-human environment? Whilst other political ideologies may provide answers to this question, environmentalism is marked out by the centrality of the human/non-human relationship to its values and policy proposals. The short answer, on one interpretation at least, is that this relationship should be a sustainable one, but what should be sustained, for whom, and over what period of time are matters over which environmentalists can disagree. This chapter will begin with a very brief and inevitably incomplete account of the history of environmental thought, in order to sketch some of the main roots of contemporary environmentalism. We will then review some of the key forms that environmental political thought takes, and examine how different environmental perspectives answer the “what is to be sustained” question. The final section will offer an assessment of the current state of environmental political philosophy, in the wake of recent work by “skeptical” environmentalists, and in the face of suggestions that environmentalism is (or should be) “dead,” and that we have moved to a “post-ecologist” age.
