Daedalus Winter 1996 [antikvár]

Preface to the Issue "The Liberation of the Environment" Environmental liberation is not yet a term in common use, and there is no reason to believe that it is about to become so, though liberations of other sorts are increasingly spoken of, acknowledged to be one of the more distinctive features of this particular fin-de-siécle. The decision to use as a unifying theme the title of the initial essay in this Dcedalus issue, "The Liberation of the Environment," reflects an acceptance of the proposition that humán agency is all-important in our thinking about the environment, that questions relating to resources, technologies, and population, all crucial elements in determining the nature of the humán habitat, are today being posed in ways that would have been less common in any earlier period, at the start of the Industrial Revolution, at the beginning of this century, and even as recently as the late 1960s and early 1970s. To say this is not to insist on the originality of the essays in this volume-though a number can claim that distinction-but to suggest that nature has been a perennial subject of meditation and reflection by philosophers and poets, and alsó, more recently, by economists, sociologists, historians, scientists, and engineers. Each, in their own way, has contributed to making us aware of why the present does