ABSTRACT
Environmental problems raise two major theoretical challenges to orthodox ethical and political thought. The first concerns the place of nonhuman nature in our scheme of values. The second concerns the place of time, history, and narrative. Both challenges raise questions that existed prior to environmental problems, but both have become stark in the new context. The way history and time enter into environmental valuation is also dealt with badly by ethical and political theories that do have an historical dimension. Contractual theories of justice are inadequate. Standard forms of ethical and political theory fail then to capture the historical dimension to environmental evaluation. The celebration of the disruption of narrative continuity in individual lives is reproduced by postmodernists at the social level. Postmodernism has been characterized in terms of the loss of the credibility of "grand narratives". Genealogy, the favorite critical tool of post-modern thought, works by unmasking troubled histories. It is premised on the importance of history in evaluation.
