Arran E. Gare takes the environmental crisis as a philosophical problem. 

Ecological destruction, he argues, cannot be separated from the Western habits of thought that render nature passive, external and available for domination. The book is sweeping in this continental philosophy assessment, it moves through Marxism, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Foucault, Derrida, Lacan and poststructuralism, testing what they, if they do at all, contribute to ecological politics—and where their conceptual limits begin to reproduce the problems they diagnose.

Underneath, his idea is that postmodernism may dismantle universalism, anthropocentrism and the fantasy of neutral reason, but an ecological politics still needs some account of reality, value and obligation that cannot simply dissolve into discourse. His answer turns toward a process-oriented “postmodern metaphysics”: a philosophy capable of treating humans as participants within a changing material world rather than sovereign observers standing outside it. Dense but very ambitious, this is environmental thought conducted through the fault lines between Marxism, continental philosophy and theories of knowledge.

Routledge, London and New York, 1995. First edition. Paperback. Moderate shelf wear and rubbing to covers, with edge wear and creasing to the lower front corner; internally clean and sound.