Thomas Heyd (ed), Recognizing the Autonomy of Nature: Theory and Practice Columbia University Press, New York, 2005, 230 + x pp (ISBN 0-231-13606-4) Steven Vogel Published online: 15 November 2007 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2007 A powerful line of argument among environmental philoso- phers asserts that humans have ethical responsibilities not merely towards individual entities in nature (such as sentient animals, or all living organisms), nor even towards more complex natural wholes (such as species or ecosystems), but also towards nature itself—where “nature” is understood simply as that part of the world that is independent of human beings and human actions. There is a prima facie duty, this line suggests, just to let nature be—to refrain from interfering in natural processes and natural developments. Draining a wetland in order to develop a shopping mall is wrong, on this account, not merely because of the harms it causes to animals and plants, nor even to the wetland ecosystem itself, but also because in doing so a region of the world independent of human action is replaced by one that human beings control. It is nature’ s autonomy that is thereby violated, and this violation is a separate harm from that caused to any particular set of natural entities. Recognizing the Autonomy of Nature, edited by Thomas Heyd, is a collection of essays all concerned with developing and (with one exception) defending this line of argument. (It’ s based in part on a series of papers originally presented at a conference held in Newfoundland). The essays are by a number of important figures in this area, including Eric Katz, Val Plumwood, Keekok Lee, Andrew Light, and William Jordan (the one sceptic). The book is divided into three sections. The first, after an introduction by Heyd (who teaches at the University of Victoria in British Columbia), includes essays by Plumwood and Lee arguing directly for the thesis that nature’ s autonomy deserves protection; the second, including essays by Katz, Ned Hettinger, and (jointly) William Throop and Beth Vickers, considers the question of what sorts of human practices might be said to respect nature’ s autonomy and what sorts violate it; and the third, with essays by Light, Mark Woods, Dean Bavington, and John Sandlos, focuses specifically on the vexed question of ecological management and restoration, practices which philosophers such as Katz in particular have problematized as paradigmatic violations of the autonomy of nature. The essay by Jordan, commissioned especially for the volume, concludes it. The essays are generally good—I especially liked the ones by Hettinger, Bavington, and Woods—although most of them seem a bit short, closer to conference paper length (which is presumably what they originally were) than to a length appropriate for making a detailed written argument. The essays by the bigger names break no new ground, but rather are either shortened versions of better-known work published elsewhere or summary restatements of it. Still, the anthology does a nice job of presenting the central issues and controversies associated with the idea of nature’ s autonomy as something worth protecting, and would be a very good introduction for someone (or for some class) first grappling with this idea and its implications. The problem is that to grapple with the idea is quickly to come up against a series of difficulties and paradoxes that none of the essays really resolves, although some do a better job than others of noticing and confronting. The difficulties have to do both with the notion of “nature” and with the notion of “autonomy” that need to be employed if the thesis that “nature is autonomous” is to make any sense and is to serve as the basis for normative claims about how humans ought to act. First of all it isn’t clear what the thesis means by the word “nature,” and in particular how it views Hum Ecol (2008) 36:137–140 DOI 10.1007/s10745-007-9145-2 S. Vogel (*) Department of Philosophy, Denison University, Granville, OH 43023, USA e-mail: vogel@denison.edu