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Environmentalists have often blamed Protestantism for justifying the human exploitation of nature, but the author of this cultural history argues that, in America, hard-boiled industrialists and passionate environmentalists sprang from the same Protestant root. Protestant Christianity Calvinism ...

Environmentalists have often blamed Protestantism for justifying the human exploitation of nature, but the author of this cultural history argues that, in America, hard-boiled industrialists and passionate environmentalists sprang from the same Protestant root. Protestant Christianity Calvinism especially both helped industrialists like James J Hill rationalise their utilisation of nature for economic profit and led environmental advocates like John Muir to call for the preservation of unspoiled wilderness. Biographical vignettes examine American thinkers, industrialists, and environmentalists Benjamin Franklin, Joseph Smith, William Gilpin, Leland Stanford, Gifford Pinchot, Aldo Leopold, and others whose lives show the development of ideas and attitudes that have profoundly shaped Americans' use of and respect for nature. The final chapter looks at several contemporary figures James Watt, Annie Dillard, and Dave Foreman whose careers exemplify the recent Protestant thought and behaviour and their impact on the environment.

Treatise on Nature and Grace by Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715), first published in 1680, is one of the most celebrated and controversial works of seventeenth-century philosophical theology. This major text, last translated into English in 1695, is here made available to a new generation of readers ...

Treatise on Nature and Grace by Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715), first published in 1680, is one of the most celebrated and controversial works of seventeenth-century philosophical theology. This major text, last translated into English in 1695, is here made available to a new generation of readers in an entirely new translation, with a substantial scholarly introduction. The central argument, that God governs the realms of nature and of grace by simple, constant, and uniform `general wills', not through `particular providence', had fundamental repercussions within the contemporary debates on the nature of divine grace and of salvation, contradicting the claims of the Calvinists and Jansenists that God wills the individual salvation of an elected few. Hailed as a work of genius by Bayle and Leibniz, the Treatise was to have a profound and far-reaching influence on the development of eighteenth-century thought through the theory of the just and justifiable `general will', which re-emerged in secular form in the work of Rousseau.

Can nature be evil, or ugly, or wrong? Can we apply moral value to nature?From a compellingly original premise, under the auspices of major thinkers including Mary Midgley, Philip Hefner, Arnold Benz and Keith Ward, Is Nature Ever Evil? examines the value-structure of our cosmos and of the science ...

Can nature be evil, or ugly, or wrong? Can we apply moral value to nature?From a compellingly original premise, under the auspices of major thinkers including Mary Midgley, Philip Hefner, Arnold Benz and Keith Ward, Is Nature Ever Evil? examines the value-structure of our cosmos and of the science that seeks to describe it. Science, says editor Willem B. Drees , claims to leave moral questions to aesthetic and religious theory. But the supposed neutrality of the scientific view masks a host of moral assumptions. How does an ethically transparent science arrive at concepts of a 'hostile' universe or a 'selfish' gene? How do botanists, zoologists, cosmologists and geologists respond to the beauty of the universe they study, reliant as it is upon catastrophe, savagery, power and extinction? Then there are various ways in which science seeks to alter and improve nature. What do prosthetics and gene technology, cyborgs and dairy cows say about our appreciation of nature itself? Surely science, in common with philosophy, magic and religion, can aid our understanding of evil in nature - whether as natural catasrophe, disease, predatory cruelty or mere cosmic indifference?Focusing on the ethical evaluation of nature itself, Is Nature Ever Evil? re-ignites crucial questions of hope, responsibility, and possibility in nature.