Liberalism's Environmental Promise by Manuel Rodeiro

Liberalism's Environmental Promise by Manuel Rodeiro

Offers a theoretical framework for how liberalism can meaningfully respond to our environmental crisis by respecting and accommodating diverse ways of relating to the natural world.

The major innovation of liberalism, now the world's dominant form of political regime, was this: cooperation amid difference. Foundational to liberal systems is toleration of diversity, which safeguards citizens' freedoms to pursue disparate views of the good life. Manuel Rodeiro is the first philosopher to think through what this commitment to toleration means for the environment. Liberalism's Environmental Promise puts forward terms of social cooperation between parties with differences in how they value and relate to the natural world. This changes the tack of environmental political theory. Rather than claiming the state should become green, Rodeiro urges it to remain neutral. He exposes state-authorized industrial expansion as unfairly elevating a single way of life over all others. What would it look like if the government were to cease promoting and favoring economic growth? How can states reckon with histories of environmental destruction that oppressively quashed so many cultures in the name of progress? Rodeiro offers an optimistic, yet practical, vision of how ecologically sustainable lifestyles might finally be allowed equal opportunity to flourish.

"This important book delivers a strategy liberal societies and states can employ to protect a plurality of environmental worldviews, particularly those that embody sustainable ways of lifeIts guidance is especially timely as renewable energy development threatens to undermine the rights of some citizens for the sake of meeting the needs of others." — Ela Tokay, SUNY Old Westbury

Manuel Rodeiro is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Mississippi State University.