ABSTRACT
While a number of the schools of environmental thought surveyed in the last chapter have attempted to link social issues to a concern for the environment, environmental ethics as an academic discipline has tended to focus more narrowly on ethics related either to changes in personal values and behavior, or to the various ways in which nature might be valued. What is lacking is a framework in which individual, social, and environmental concerns can be looked at not in isolation from each other, but rather in terms of their interrelationships. Such a framework would not only serve to reestablish a connection between environmental ethics and social ethics, but also hopefully provide a deeper, more comprehensive understanding of the ethical dimensions of how humans and societies interact with their natural environments. The aim of the following chapters is to develop a specifi cally transactional framework for ethics which offers a dynamic and coevolutionary understanding of how humans interact with their natural environments. Such a framework will hopefully allow questions related to interactions between self, society, and nature to be discussed across disciplines and from a variety of viewpoints.
