Title: Re-Engineering Environmentalism for Limited Beings
Subtitle: Liberalism, Naturalism and Environmentalism in the Anthropocene
Subject Classification:  Climate Change, Sustainability, Philosophy  
BIC Classification: RB, RN
BISAC Classification: SCI092000, POL044000, SCI101000
Binding: Hardback, eBook
Publication date: 04 Jul 2025
ISBN (Hardback): 978-1-80441-318-0
ISBN (eBook): 978-1-80441-319-7

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Description

Why are we failing to make meaningful progress on mitigating and adapting to climate change? A standard reply - all too easy for academics to endorse - is that we understand the problem theoretically, but practical political problems are hard to solve for all the usual practical, political reasons. This book challenges this narrative. Tensions in the philosophical assumptions of climate change activism must be resolved before practical policy choices can be coherently implemented. The book draws attention to basic trade-offs between three broad ideological commitments, all of which seem indispensable, but which don’t ‘play well’ together as a trio: liberalism, environmentalism, and philosophical naturalism. It is argued that a reconciliation of these ideological commitments will require greater humility, and some toothy concessions, on the part of liberals, environmentalists, and even naturalists of an activist bent. What we need is politically defensible, ecologically sustainable policy that does not implicitly rely on supernatural (or superhuman) interventions, as current policy options do. Successful environmental policy must acknowledge not only planetary limits, but also the natural limits of human agency in a liberal world. There is a wealth of natural scientific analysis of climate change and ecology, as well as a vast literature of the economics, sociology, and political science of environmental governance. Yet there is a surprising gap in the literature: a lack of systematic efforts to examine the intersection of philosophy of science, including the human sciences, ethics, and environmental governance in the Anthropocene. This book seeks to address that gap.

Biography

Author(s):  Morgan Tait is Adjunct Professor, School of Environment and Resource Studies and Special Lecturer, Department of Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo, Canada. He is also a lecturer in the Department of Philosophy at King’s University College, University of Western Ontario.

Reviews

"With clarity, rigor, and careful concern for the stakes of the issues, Tait explores the uneasy fit between three philosophical positions that he expressly endorses: liberalism, naturalism, and environmentalism, showing how together they lead to a contemporary problem of inconsistent triads. His diagnosis is acute and clever, using an analogy that aligns each of three brothers from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov with a respective pairing from the triad. Ivan is a committed naturalist and environmentalist. Because he is skeptical of human agency as capable of adequate response to environmental problems, he is willing to enact non-liberal methods of coercion and control. Alyosha by contrast believes fervently in human agential freedom and goodness. Wanting to protect the environment, he nevertheless fails to appreciate the natural limits of moral argumentation in changing behavior and thus fails to be effective. Finally, Dimitri is a liberal naturalist who balances human freedom against limits of rational argumentation but sees no natural or moral necessity for protecting the environment. Instead, he dismisses environmental constraints altogether, naively believing that natural forces and mechanisms will continue to evolve and self-correct. For Tait, each brother has an insight and a fatal flaw. Tait accordingly argues that “fraternal reconciliation” is the only path towards a sustainable future for human beings and suggests we learn to balance them against each other “in orthogonal but ultimately complementary” ways. The thorough and careful consideration of critical and timely questions make this text a welcome addition for readers inclined towards liberalism, naturalism, or environmentalism."
- Professor Russell J. Duvernoy, King’s University College at Western University, Canada