Thinking Like a Mall

<b>A provocative argument that environmental thinking would be better off if it dropped the concept of nature altogether and spoke instead of the built environment.</b><p>Environmentalism in theory and practice is concerned with protecting nature. But if we have now reached the end of nature as Bill McKibben and other environmental thinkers have declared what is there left to protect? In <i>Thinking like a Mall</i> Steven Vogel argues that environmental thinking would be better off if it dropped the concept of nature altogether and spoke instead of the environment--that is the world that actually surrounds us which is always a <i>built </i>world the only one that we inhabit. We need to think not so much like a mountain (as Aldo Leopold urged) as like a mall. Shopping malls too are part of the environment and deserve as much serious consideration from environmental thinkers as do mountains. </p><p>Vogel argues provocatively that environmental philosophy in its ethics should no longer draw a distinction between the natural and the artificial and in its politics should abandon the idea that something beyond human practices (such as nature) can serve as a standard determining what those practices ought to be. The appeal to nature distinct from the built environment he contends may be not merely unhelpful to environmental thinking but in itself harmful to that thinking. The question for environmental philosophy is not how can we save nature? but rather what environment should we inhabit and what practices should we engage in to help build it?</p>