Abstract
Roderick Nash, professor both of history and of environmental studies at the Santa Barbara Campus of the University of California, is perhaps best known for his book Wilderness and the American Mind, which outlined the history of conservation and wilderness preservation, together with its cultural background, in the United States. The Rights of Nature documents the history of the development of the concept of natural rights, with focus on religion, legal philosophy, and recent environmental activism. This book, in the series "A History of American Thought and Culture," is almost entirely limited to the Anglo-American tradition. The book is very well documented and interesting to read. It focuses on one main theme: the concept of "natural rights" has expanded through the centuries (rights were gradually extended to include women, nonwhite races, workers, etc.) and is now extending to include the natural world (sentient animals, all organisms, whole ecosystems). Therefore the demand of some environmentalists that nonhuman organisms be granted legal rights, a demand usually considered to be on the radical fringe, is actually the next step in the extension of civil liberties to oppressed parties. Nash considers radical environmentalism to be a continuation of rather than a departure from Anglo-American tradition. This seems to contradict his earlier book in which he implied that saving the wilderness required a departure from Anglo-American habits of thought.