Books

Moral Ground

Moral Ground: Ethical Action for a Planet in Peril (Trinity University Press, 2010), co-edited with Kathleen Dean Moore, brings together the testimony of over eighty visionaries to present a diverse and compelling call to honor our individual and collective moral responsibility to our planet. In the face of environmental degradation and global climate change, scientific knowledge alone does not tell us what we ought to do. The missing premise of the argument and much-needed center piece in the debate to date has been the need for ethical values, moral guidance, and principled reasons for doing the right thing for our planet, its animals, its plants, and its people.

The Wilderness Debate Rages On

The Wilderness Debate Rages On: Continuing the Great New Wilderness Debate (U. of Georgia Press, 2008), co-edited with J. Baird Callicott. Ten years ago, The Great New Wilderness Debate began a cross-disciplinary conversation about the varied constructions of "wilderness" and the controversies that surround them. The Wilderness Debate Rages On reinvigorates that conversation. It gathers both critiques and defenses of the idea of wilderness from a wide variety of perspectives and voices. It includes the best explorations of the concept of wilderness from the past decade, under appreciated essays from the early twentieth century that offer an alternative vision of the concept and importance of wilderness, and writings meant to clarify or help us rethink the concept of wilderness.

American Indian Environmental Ethics

American Indian Environmental Ethics: An Ojibwa Case Study (Prentice-Hall, 2004), co-authored with J. Baird Callicott, offers an engaging study of environmental ethics with particular emphasis on an ethics supported by the Ojibwa cultural worldview. Connecting environmental theory with diverse stories from Ojibwa Indians, Callicott and Nelson reveal the meaning and power of cultural worldviews as they inform ethical principles and practices, as they show that competing worldviews demonstrate the many ways "of cognitively organizing human experience." 

The Great Wilderness Debate

The Great New Wilderness Debate (U. of Georgia Press, 1998), co-edited with J. Baird Callicott, is an expansive, wide-ranging collection that addresses the pivotal environmental issues of the modern era. The Great New Wilderness Debate began a cross-disciplinary conversation about the varied constructions of "wilderness" and the controversies that surrounded them. The eclectic volume on the varied constructions of “wilderness” reveals the recent controversies that surround those conceptions, and the gulf between those who argue for wilderness "preservation" and those who argue for "wise use."