Overview

Just who is Chinnagounder? He is one man in India, trying to deal with the competing stresses of postcolonialism and environmentalism-a man to whom Deane Curtin introduces us in this sophisticated work of public philosophy which explores questions such as: Can indigenous peoples define the terms of change for themselves? What impact does postcolonialism have on population, social justice, and women's rights? How can inhabitants of our global village balance the preservation of wild nature and the ever-increasing need for access to land and to safe food and water? When Indian centenarian, Chinnagounder, asked why Deane Curtin about his interest in traditional medicine, especially since he wasn't working for a drug company looking to patent a new discovery, Curtin wondered whether it was possible for the industrialised world to interact with native cultures for reasons other than to exploit them, develop them, and eradicate their traditional practices. The answer, according to Curtin, defines the ethical character of what we typically call ""progress."" Despite the familiar assertion that we live in a global village, cross cultural environmental and social conflicts are often marked by failures of communication due to deeply divergent assumptions. Such conflicts include the globalisation of trade versus the authority of traditional and indigenous peoples, the need to control population versus the recognition of women as active participants in framing social policy, and the need to preserve nature and the wilderness versus the ever-increasing need for access to land, safe food, and water. Curtin articulates a response to Chinnagounder's challenge in terms of a new, distinctly postcolonial, environmental ethic.

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Reviews

... an important contribution to environmental philosophy... includes provocative discussions of institutional and systemic violence, indigenous resistance to development, the land ethic, deep ecology, ecofeminism, women's ecological knowledge, Jeffersonian agrarian republicanism, Berry's ideas about principled engagement in community, wilderness advocacy, and the need for an attachment to place. Choice This is a very important book, raising serious questions for development theorists and environmentalists alike. Boston Book Review

Curtin (philosophy, Gustavus Adolphus College) offers an important contribution to environmental philosophy. Though concerned with proposing an American environmental ethic, he shows that such an ethic requires an intercultural context. On a research trip to India, Curtin met a centenarian, Chinnagounder, who told of environmental displacement and economic upheaval by Western developers and planters. Finding the dominant Western proposals for environmental ethics misguided, especially regarding the intrinsic/extrinsic value-of-nature question, Curtin argues that though Western social values appear just from within, they may produce grave injustice when exported. Ethics, he thinks, especially environmental ethics, must emerge in situ, through attachment to place. In developing his theory, Curtin makes excellent use of McIntyre's concept of a practice as including internal goods not reducible to external values. The consequent moral pluralism is not cultural relativism; rather, Curtin proposes a critical ecocommunitarianism, issuing from a substantive relationship with nature but recognizing the need to face criticism from within and without. Just that clarification of what pluralism might mean makes the book worthwhile, but Curtin also includes provocative discussions of institutional and systemic violence, indigenous resistance to development, the land ethic, deep ecology, ecofeminism, women's ecological knowledge, Jeffersonian agrarian republicanism, Berry's ideas about principled engagement in community, wilderness advocacy, and the need for an attachment to place. Upper-division undergraduates through professionals. -W. Ouderkirk, SUNY Empire State College, Choice, June 2000

Author Information

Deane Curtin is Raymong and Florence Sponberg Chair of Ethics and Professor of Philosophy at Gustavus Adolphus College. He is co-editor of Cooking, Eating, Thinking: Transformative Philosophies of Food (Indiana University Press). He has lived and taught in India, Japan, and Italy and has published on deep ecology, ecofeminism, and contemporary Gandhian resistance to development.

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