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MORAL MANAGEMENT
Beyond the Land Ethic: More Essays in Environmental Philosophy, J. Baird Callicott. 1999, SUNY Press. 368 p., $74.50 cloth, $24.95 paper.
For Journal of Forestry readers who enjoyed the January 1998 debate regarding the relevance of Aldo Leopold's environmental ethic to today's forestry, this book offers a chance to more deeply explore the core philosophic issues that underlie J. Baird Callicott's argument in that debate.
Callicott is professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of North Texas, and at the time of publication was president of the International Society for Environmental Ethics. This collection of essays, with one exception, follow his In Defense of the Land Ethic: Essays in Environmental Philosophy (1989), which was an attempt to frame the thinking of Leopold, an "amateur twenty-first century philosopher. .. living in the twentieth century" (p. 7) with the concerns and formal conceptual tools of a professional philosopher. All of the essays have been previously published in disparate journals and collections that would not normally be monitored by foresters, and so their compilation into a single volume renders the thinking of this important environmental philosopher much more accessible.
Accessible in a physical sense, that is. For someone with no background in or exposure to formal philosophy-the unfortunate plight of most foresters and other natural resource professionals-this may be a challenging read. One need go no further than the essay titles to obtain a hint of the unfamiliar language to follow (for example, Chapter 12, "Intrinsic Value In Nature: A Metaethical Analysis").
Following an introductory chapter, the 19 previously published essays are organized into six sections, the first of which is titled "Practicing Environmental Ethics." The three essays in this section have some very personal undertones that help the reader understand the author's fundamental view of the world and his profession's place in it....