ABSTRACT
Environmental philosophy is a young discipline that has swiftly gained international academic status. This success is undoubtedly in large part due to the rapid growth of a strong consensus among the most prominent environmental philosophers on the basic tenets of the discipline, a consensus which has enabled them to close ranks and unite into a single front. The other side of this coin is a certain degree of dogmatism and a certain amount of intolerance of dissident voices. In spite of variations in emphasis, the various ‘canonical’ texts of environmental philosophy display a sufficient number of common characteristics to allow one to speak of a single family. This family is a direct descendant of radical ecology, which originated primarily in America. Within radical ecology it is possible to distinguish four broad currents that can be found, in some configuration or other, in the work of nearly all environmental philosophers: Arne Naess’ deep ecology, in which the current environmental crisis is attributed to modern man’s anthropocentrism; Murray Bookchin’s social ecology, which ascribes our hostile behaviour towards nature to the existence of hierarchical relationships among human beings; Ivan Illich’s political ecology, which follows René Girard in holding man’s mimetic desire responsible for the degradation of the environment; and ecofeminism, which points to androcentrism rather than anthropocentrism as the main culprit.
