Defense of the Land Ethic, Beyond the Land Ethic engages a wide spectrum of topics central to the field, including the troubled relationship of environmental philosophy to current mainstream academic philosophy; the relationship of recent developments in evolutionary and ecological sciences to the Leopold land ethic long championed by the author; the perennial debates in environmental ethics about the ontological status of intrinsic value and the necessity of moral pluralism; the metaphysical implications of ecology and the New Physics as manifest in agriculture, medicine, and industrial technology; and the philosophical dimensions of conservation biology and “clinical ecology.”

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