Because many people and ecosystems share--or constitute--any given place, they all have a stake in the outcome of what any of us do in regard to environmental problems. It is not surprising that issues are hotly contested given the many divergent interests, needs, and preferences of a community's members, much less those of people "downstream" who are affected by the consequences of our actions or of "outside" parties who play a part, including those who would speak on behalf of the ecosystems. Thus, we not only must make careful individual decisions concerning the environment, but need to...

Environmental Dilemmas focuses on the ethical problems and dilemmas that emerge in place-based professional practices_architecture, landscape architecture, planning, engineering, and construction management. Mugerauer and Manzo connect decision-making to major ethical theories, principles, and rules, and professional codes of ethics.

themes among the essays resurface and resonate. Though our request for essays was broad and open-ended, we found that topics such as seeing, authenticity, interpretation, wholeness, care, and dwelling ran as undercur rents throughout. Our major hope is that each essay plays a part in revealing a larger whole of meaning which says much about a more humane relation ship with places, environments and the earth as our home. Part I. Beginnings and directions At the start, we recognize the tremendous debt this volume owes to philosopher Martin Heidegger (1890-1976), whose ontological excavations...

Much recent philosophical work proposes to illuminate dilemmas of human existence with reference to the arts and culture, often to the point of submitting particular works to preconceived formulations. In this examination of three texts that respond to loss, Robert Mugerauer responds with close, detailed readings that seek to clarify the particularity of the intense force such works bring forth. Mugerauer shows how, in the face of what is irrevocably taken away as well as of what continues to be given, the unavoidable task of interpretation is ours alone. Mugerauer examines works in three...

In this pioneering book, Robert Mugerauer seeks to make deconstruction and hermeneutics accessible to people in the environmental disciplines, including architecture, planning, urban studies, environmental studies, and cultural geography.

Mugerauer demonstrates each methodology through a case study. The first study uses the traditional approach to recover the meaning of Jung's and Wittgenstein's houses by analyzing their historical, intentional contexts. The second case study utilizes deconstruction to explore Egyptian, French neoclassical, and postmodern attempts to use pyramids to...