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Mark J. Smith: Ecologism: Towards Ecological Citizenship. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
Mark Smith is a British lecturer in social sciences at the Open University, who also taught ecology at the University of Sussex. His fields of interest are social and political theory, the philosophy of the social sciences, cultural politics, critical theory and environmental sociology. This slim book is actually a philosophical essay grounded in the environmental social sciences. It represents an effort to criticize the anthropocentric approaches that have always dominated in these fields of knowledge and to further the causes of ecocentrism and deep ecology. For Smith, ecologism is a new way of viewing the relationship between society and nature. He insists on the difference between two historical types of ecologism, namely the anthropocentric conservationism of people like Pinchot, and the ecocentric preservationism of Thoreau, Muir and Leopold. He also indicates the seminal importance of Rachel Carson, the Meadows, Goldsmith and Naess for ecologism, and especially for ecocentrism.
To cope with the issue of how we value the green environment, he explores, in Chapter Two, the question of the present generation's obligations...