ABSTRACT
Few writers have been as closely associated with nature as Rousseau. It is therefore unsurprising that Rousseau has been read by scholars as a key source for environmentalism. I argue that the most familiar line of Rousseau’s influence runs from his accounts of his or his characters’ spiritual or aesthetic interactions with nature. These form the basis of what we can call an environmentalism of the man, which concerns the moral relationship that human beings have as individuals with the natural world. In addition, however, Rousseau also depicts human beings as inhabitants in the landscape who actively transform their surroundings, and he links the transformation of landscape to the emergence of social groups and the maintenance of republican political order. Thus, he also provides the material for what we can call an environmentalism of the citizen, which is in deep tension with the environmentalism of the man.
