Abstract

The suppressed thesis of this work is that environmental and natural resource policies in the advanced industrial countries, and especially in the United States, can not work to bring about the stated goals of legislative policies such as the National Environmental Protection Act or the Endangered Species Act because the clearest and strongest tenets of these legislative ideas are in fundamental conflict with the self-description of most modern people and their self-reflection in their shaping of institutions. ;The more concretely stated thesis is based on a model of the contemporary industrial person as having shed older identities and having taken on a self-created nature, one that owes nothing to the natural world but owes everything to the created environment. The thesis, then, is that a new human type has made the concept of environmentalism impossible to realize. ;Cracks in the modern collective ego of industrial societies suggest that a counter current could conceivably cause a sense of deep uncertainty about our self-definition. The environmentalist qua preservationist might possibly succeed in articulating a "reason" why we should stop destroying wild nature, and that we should attempt to communicate this reason to other nations. Thus far the preservationists have failed to state the reason that motivates their own behavior. The remainder of this work is devoted to articulating the needed reason, the philosophical and political coherence of this rationality. The sense of this idea is that we owe duties not to others first, but to ourselves. Yet "self" is the very problematic notion we started with. Our very self-definition, which shapes our notions of ethics, distorts the old understanding of duties to ourselves