The Gardeners' Dirty Hands

Environmental Politics and Christian Ethics

Noah J. Toly

Argues that scarcity, tragedy, and risk symbolize the tragic and reveal the chief preoccupations of modern environmental thought and global environmental governance
Draws upon Christian theological and ethical insights to address those challenges
Puts environmental politics in conversation with Dietrich Bonhoeffer and other Christian theologians and ethicists

The Gardeners' Dirty Hands

Environmental Politics and Christian Ethics

Noah J. Toly

Description

The past three centuries have witnessed the accumulation of unprecedented levels of wealth and the production of unprecedented risks. These risks include the declining integrity and stability of many of the world's environments, which face dramatic and possibly irreversible change as the environmental burdens of late modern lifestyles increasingly shift to fragile ecosystems, vulnerable communities, and future generations. Globalization has increased the scope and scale of these risks, as well as the pace of their emergence. It has also made possible global environmental governance, attempts to manage risk by unprecedented numbers and types of authoritative agents, including state and non-state actors at the local, national, regional, and global levels.

In The Gardeners' Dirty Hands: Environmental Politics and Christian Ethics, Noah Toly offers an interpretation of environmental governance that draws upon insights into the tragic - the need to forego, give up, undermine, or destroy one or more goods in order to possess or secure one or more other goods. Toly engages Christian and classical Greek ideas of the tragic to illuminate the enduring challenges of environmental politics. He suggests that Christians have unique resources for responsible engagement with global environmental politics while acknowledging the need for mutually agreed, and ultimately normative, restraints.

The Gardeners' Dirty Hands

Environmental Politics and Christian Ethics

Noah J. Toly

The Gardeners' Dirty Hands

Environmental Politics and Christian Ethics

Noah J. Toly

Author Information

Noah J. Toly, Associate Professor, Wheaton College

Noah Toly is Professor of Urban Studies and Politics & International Relations at Wheaton College where he directs the Center for Urban Engagement. He also serves as Non-Resident Senior Fellow for Global Cities at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and as a member of the faculty at the Free University of Berlin's Center for Global Politics.

The Gardeners' Dirty Hands

Environmental Politics and Christian Ethics

Noah J. Toly

Reviews and Awards

"an unexpectedly deep work of political and theological reflection ... Toly's work helps us, believers and non-believers alike, to articulate a more hopeful response. It is not a recipe for something that our own contradictions ought to warn us away from, but rather a recommendation for a hope which can co-exist with tragedy, a hope for endurance and grace as we do the hard, difficult work which this planet we have changed calls us to." - Russell Arben Fox, Front Porch Republic

"This book is courageously honest, rigorously argued, and practically important for our present and future. Toly unflinchingly examines "the impossibility of possessing all non-trivial goods at once" in environmental governance and articulates a Bonhoefferian ethics for making tragic choices that integrates radical humility and hope. This work is highly recommended, especially for Christians seeking a responsible vision of environmental ethics and our shared future." - Andrew DeCort, author of Bonhoeffer's New Beginning: Ethics after Devastation

"Noah Toly raises many of the most difficult questions besetting the nexus of environmental problems and the human pursuit of wealth and power. Revealing the tragedy of choices based on flawed foundations, Toly points the way out of a system prioritizing economic efficiency toward one in which individuals acknowledge wrong and bear the costs of the wrong so others might benefit—a Christian church of public environmental engagement and redemption." - Fred Van Dyke, author of Redeeming Creation: The Biblical Basis for Environmental Stewardship

"In this remarkably clear-minded explanation of environmental governance challenges, Noah Toly interprets their tragic character within Christian moral thought in a way that opens a range of legitimate responses and orients agents toward hopeful responsibility." - Willis Jenkins, author ofThe Future of Ethics: Sustainability, Social Justice, and Religious Creativity