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Simon P. James, How Nature Matters: Culture, Identity, & Environmental Value, Oxford University Press, 2022, 173pp., $82.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780198871613.
Reviewed by Allen Thompson, Oregon State University
Simon James offers an engaging and useful view about how parts of nature have constitutive value as important, often irreplaceable parts of meaningful wholes. It is a descriptive account of one way in which nature can be valuable to human beings, which means contributing to human welfare, as an alternative to the dominant view that nature is valuable to us only as it provides resources useful in the pursuit of human ends. According to James, in addition to being valuable as a means or (as many environmental philosophers will insist) valuable as ends in themselves (i.e., final ends), parts of nature are valuable when they are key features of what we take to be meaningful in the context of a cultural identity that serves as…
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