An Artforum Best Book of the Year A Legal Theory Bookworm Book of the Year
Nature no longer exists apart from humanity. Henceforth, the world we will inhabit is the one we have made. Geologists have called this new planetary epoch the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans. The geological strata we are now creating record industrial emissions, industrial-scale crop pollens, and the disappearance of species driven to extinction. Climate change is planetary engineering without design. These facts of the Anthropocene are scientific, but its shape and meaning are questions for politics—a politics that does not yet exist. After Nature develops a politics for this post-natural world.
“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.” —Christine Smallwood, Harper’s
“Dazzling…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.” —Ross Andersen, The Atlantic
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After Nature: A Politics for the Anthropocene
An Artforum Best Book of the Year A Legal Theory Bookworm Book of the Year
Nature no longer exists apart from humanity. Henceforth, the world we will inhabit is the one we have made. Geologists have called this new planetary epoch the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans. The geological strata we are now creating record industrial emissions, industrial-scale crop pollens, and the disappearance of species driven to extinction. Climate change is planetary engineering without design. These facts of the Anthropocene are scientific, but its shape and meaning are questions for politics—a politics that does not yet exist. After Nature develops a politics for this post-natural world.
“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.” —Christine Smallwood, Harper’s
“Dazzling…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.” —Ross Andersen, The Atlantic
An Artforum Best Book of the Year A Legal Theory Bookworm Book of the Year
Nature no longer exists apart from humanity. Henceforth, the world we will inhabit is the one we have made. Geologists have called this new planetary epoch the Anthropocene, the Age of Humans. The geological strata we are now creating record industrial emissions, industrial-scale crop pollens, and the disappearance of species driven to extinction. Climate change is planetary engineering without design. These facts of the Anthropocene are scientific, but its shape and meaning are questions for politics—a politics that does not yet exist. After Nature develops a politics for this post-natural world.
“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.” —Christine Smallwood, Harper’s
“Dazzling…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.” —Ross Andersen, The Atlantic
Jedediah Purdy is Robinson O. Everett Professor of Law at Duke University School of Law.
Table of Contents
Cover Title Copyright Dedication Contents Prologue Introduction Three Crises Nature as Politics and Anti-Politics Four Versions of Anti-Politics Prospects Order and Disorder in Early New England Two Paths toward Democracy Chapter 2. God’s Avid Gardeners Locke and the Commoners’ Terrain Savages and Slaves: A New Unequal Terrain Trader Imagination versus Settler Imagination A Road Not Taken Chapter 3. Nature as Teacher A Pause for Flowers: Philip Freneau Learning from the Land: John Quincy Adams Training the Eye: The Hudson River School Chapter 4. Natural Utopias A Choice of Inheritances Arguing over Concord: Transcendentalism and Its Uses Making the Sierra Club’s Nature A Romantic Cultural Politics The Sierra Club and Public-Lands Politics How Nature’s Utopia Became Less Radical Natural Utopias A Walden for the Anthropocene Chapter 5. A Conservationist Empire Progressive Management and the Idea of Conservation The Roots of Conservation Social and Moral Reform The Conservation of Civic Virtue The Humanism of Socialized Consumption Conservation, Eugenics, and Racism Chapter 6. A Wilderness Passage into Ecology Ecology’s Darker Origins Opening a New Door Ecology: From New Dawn to Chronic Crisis Intergenerational Legal Interpretation in the Ecological Age Chapter 7. Environmental Law in the Anthropocene From Wilderness to Cultivation: Food, Agriculture, and the Value of Work Animals and the Ethics of Encounters across Species Climate Change: From Failure to New Standards of Success The Breakdown of Familiar Ideas Respect for Failure Chapter 8. What Kind of Democracy? Ecological Economics Democracy and Post-Humanism Exclusion and Misanthropy Notes Acknowledgments Index