The Love of Nature and the End of the World ─ The Unspoken Dimensions of Environmental Concern

Virtually everyone values some aspect of the natural world. Yet many people aresurprisingly unconcerned about environmental issues, treating them as the province of specialinterest groups. Seeking to understand how our appreciation for the beauty of nature and ourindifference to its destruction can coexist in us, Shierry Weber Nicholsen explores dimensions ofour emotional experience with the natural world that are so deep and painful that they often remainunspoken.The Love of Nature and the End of the World is a gathering of meditations and collages. Itsevocations of our emotional attachment to the natural world and the emotional impact ofenvironmental deterioration are meant to encourage individual and collective reflection on adifficult dilemma. Nicholsen draws on work in environmental philosophy and ecopsychology; thewritings of psychoanalytic thinkers such as Wilfred Bion, Donald Meltzer, and D. W. Winnicott; andideas from Buddhist and Sufi traditions. She shows how our emotional responses to thevulnerabilities of the natural world range from intense caring and compassion, through grief andoutrage, to diffuse depression. Individual chapters focus on silence and the process whereby we movefrom the unspoken to the spoken, the love of nature, the "perceptual reciprocity" with the naturalworld to which we might mature, beauty in the human and natural realms, the psychological impact ofthe destruction of the natural world, and reflections on the future.

Ruth R. Faden, Ph.D., M.P.H., is the Philip Franklin Wagley Professorof Biomedical Ethics and Executive Director of The Phoebe R.Berman Bioethics Institute at Johns Hopkins University. She is theauthor, with Tom L. Beauchamp, of: A History and Theory of InformedConsent and coeditor of AIDS, Women and the Next Generation andHIV, AIDS and Childbearing: Public Policy, Private Lives.