What is the optimal political framework for environmental reform - reform on a scale commensurate with the global ecological crisis? In particular, how adequate are liberal forms of parliamentary democracy to face the challenges posed by the crisis? These are the questions pondered by the contributors to this volume. Exploration of the possibilities of democracy gives rise to certain common themes. These include the relation between ecological morality and political structures or procedures and the question of the structure of decision-making and distribution of information in political...

In this sequel to For Love of Matter: A Contemporary Panpsychism, also published by SUNY Press, Freya Mathews argues that replacing the materialist premise of modern civilization with a panpsychist one transforms the entire fabric of culture in profound ways. She claims that the environmental crisis is a symptom of deeper issues facing modern civilization arising from the loss of the very meaning of culture. To come to grips with this crisis requires a change in the metaphysical premise of modernity deeper than any as yet envisaged even by the radical ecology movement. This is a change with...

On a sunny October morning in 1999, three friends set off to find the source of their local creek, the Merri. Starting where the Merri joins the Yarra River, they followed the watercourse through city, suburbs, outer industrial wastelands, farmscapes and the foothills of the Great Divide. Temples, goddesses, medieval churches, sacred birds, sanctuaries, holy waters and powerful originary sites manifested to the walkers along the way, until after seven days they reached the headwaters, where a final revelation awaited them. Was pilgrimage a kind of philosopher's stone, they wondered, that...

In Without Animals Life Is Not Worth Living, eco-philosopher Freya Mathews livens up her theme - that the company of animals is indispensable to human existence - by way of the story of an anarchic but irresistible pig.

'In this captivating story of a pig and a philosopher, Freya takes up the narratival mode of exposition that has recently engaged philosophers. Her account of Pookie tells of a human person's love across a huge species boundary. Few pigs have been so fondly and respectfully brought into print. Freya's philosophical commitment to truth leads her into...