Reading Towards Environmental Justice: An Optimistic Conversation

Berry, Thomas.  "Economics as a Religious Issue." The Dream of the Earth. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988.
--focuses on the "economics of the earth as a functional community," a form of "planetary socialism" that defines the earth as our primary self-nourishing, self-governing and self-fulfilling context.

White, Richard. "Are You an Environmentalist or Do You Work for a Living?" Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature. Ed. William Cronin. New York: Norton, 1995. 171-185.
--about the problematic attitude most environmentalists take towards work (work in general, but esp. hard physical labor in nature, which they see, categorically, as destructive and degrading of the environment): they self-rightously present nature, instead, as a site that needs to be protected for play and leisure. white argues (compellingly, i think, though he is too dismissive of the importance of play!) that work is a fundamental way for us to come to know nature, that the separation of us (even/especially those of us who spend our days inside typing) from nature is an illusion, that we need to unmask the environmental consequences of our work, the connections between nature and whatever labor we do. i could use it in my course, to help my students reflect on the relation of the time i will have them spending outside w/ what goes on in the buildings on campus. (cf. also Slovic's Going Away to Think: Engagement, Retreat and Ecocritical Responsibility, on  the social role of ecological literary criticism)hi david and anne,