Environmental Ethics

Volume 27, Issue 4, Winter 2005

Fraud, Fantasy, and Fiction in Environmental Writing

During the past several decades, a number of accounts of environmental and ethnic wisdom have appeared which have later been exposed as fraudulent. The widespread popularity of these accounts should be understood as symptomatic of valid feelings and awarenesses that are unable to find expression in the modern world, and are usually dissociated from mainstream decision-making processes. As the natural order continues to be degraded, forms such as fiction which currently have relatively low status will become more important as vehicles for feelings, ideas, and possibilities which can find no other refuge within a world increasingly dominated by technological and economic viewpoints.