Nature and environment

This chapter treats Reinhold Niebuhr’s thought on nature and environment in an effort to evaluate its utility for contemporary environmental politics and ethics. Like a small but growing group of Niebuhrian environmental ethicists, the chapter finds in Niebuhr’s thought both peril and promise. Niebuhr’s anthropological focus leaves him inattentive to the ethical status of the more-than-human world, the intrinsic value of which is a premise for much contemporary environmental ethics and politics. Nonetheless, Niebuhr’s insistence on the social nature of sin and the exigencies of democratic political power should have a more central place in contemporary thinking about the politics of nature and environment. The chapter makes this argument by way of attention to a few themes in Niebuhr’s thought, primarily nuclear science, nature, and industry.