Though environmental philosophers trace the roots of environmental awareness to the decades of John Dewey’s prominence, Dewey himself was conspicuously mum about the environmental controversies of his day. A Deweyan environmental pragmatism, then, must find sustenance in less prosaically environmental themes of the American philosopher’s project. This chapter attends to Dewey’s notion of organism-environment interaction, which is at the core of Dewey’s understanding of experience and which informs Dewey’s philosophy from epistemology to aesthetics. The chapter stresses that Dewey’s notion of organism-environment interaction is an account of how organisms dynamically respond to changes in their environment. However, contrary to several misinterpretations of environmental pragmatism, this dynamic responsiveness is not a call for human control over nature. Indeed, we conclude that an environmental philosophy oriented by Dewey’s notion of organism-environment interaction provides promising approaches to interdisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, and environmental justice.
The Ugency of the Greening of Ethics