Introduction

Fittingness has a long genealogy in the history of religion and philosophy. Indo-European traditions have long shared a metaphysical conception of order – rta in Sanskrit, arta in ancient Persian – which carries with it the belief that humanity’s first and foremost calling – both moral and spiritual – is to fit the self and human society to the divinely given order of things. Despite the central role of corporate industrialism in displacing forms of life which were more fitting to conserving the natural environment, modern environmental thought has tended to focus on approaches to environmental repair that are concerned not so much with practices as with how humans think about, or value, the nonhuman. This reflects the mentality just discussed that emanates from the European Enlightenment and distinguishes, as first did David Hume, between natural ‘facts’ and human ‘values’. This chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.