Emerson and Environmental Ethics is a timely study that lays important groundwork on Emerson and environmentalism. It is responsive to the critical canon and theoretical turns in Emerson studies, but not explicitly so. Beautifully and carefully written, the work itself feels Emersonian with startling turns of phrase and insight…This volume affirms that there is still much to learn from Emerson in our own time of environmental crisis.— Emerson Society Papers
Emerson is still vastly under-appreciated as a philosopher and, as Dunston thoroughly shows, must be appreciated as a fundamentally—and foundationally important—environmental thinker.— Environmental Philosophy
Ralph Waldo Emerson is often considered essentially a poet, in verse and prose. But Susan Dunston takes him seriously as a philosopher whose environmental ethics influenced such diverse figures as Henry Thoreau, William James, D. T. Suzuki, Aldo Leopold, Loren Eiseley, Annie Dillard, Alan Watts, and E. O. Wilson, and whose ecological concerns are paralleled in contemporary eco-feminism, Indigenous culture, and other forms. Implicit in Emerson’s stirring charge to “Build . . . your own world,” Dunston shows, is not egoism but rather an ethic of accountability, “that we not harm.” Her widely informed, close analyses of Emerson’s writings open exciting new contexts for understanding his Transcendentalist manifesto Nature (1836) as well as several of his essential essays. At the same time, her book is a quietly impassioned call for an empathetic sense of “interconnected diversity” and genuine “nature literacy,” which are desperately needed for our planet’s ecological health.
— Wesley Mott, Worcester Polytechnic Institute
Susan L. Dunston's Emerson and Environmental Ethics reacquaints readers with Emerson as a brilliant mind in his time and ours. Every chapter is full of surprising insights into his work and its relevance to the most compelling concerns of today.
— Catherine Rainwater, St. Edward's University
In this lucid, accessible, and beautifully written account of Emerson's philosophy, Susan Dunston charts a compelling path from Emerson's unifying vision to much later environmental philosophies. Her magnificent close readings reveal a writer equally committed to a philosophical thinking that is "sensuous, experiential, and reformist" and a practice that is "attentive, relational, empathetic, and aesthetically sensitive." Readers of this book will discover a progressive, practical, and influential Emerson who remains the deeply reflective writer we have long known.
— Kristin Boudreau, Worcester Polytechnic Institute