Abstract
Turmoil in the Middle East, Africa, and South Asia has plunged the world into yet another era of nation building. The U.S. is now engaged in the difficult task of reconstructing Afghanistan and Iraq, reportedly along democratic lines. Beneath all of the rhetoric it is assumed that democracy is a useful model for severely conflicted Muslim countries with no experience of it and, further, that ours is an adequate framework in which to conduct the public business of any country in the twenty-first century. The first assumption has been challenged as premature or even naive (Zakaria 2003). But it is the second, and more important, of the two that I intend to question—and in particular the constitutional framework within which our own politics occur.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Notes
- 1.
This article was originally published in 2003.
References
Beard, C. A. 1913. An Economic Interpretation of the Constitution of the United States. New York: Free Press, 1935.
Caldwell, L. K. 1998. The National Environmental Policy Act. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Dahl, R. 2002. How Democratic Is the American Constitution? New Haven: Yale University Press.
Heinz Center. 2002. The State of the Nation’s Ecosystems. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Jones, H. M. 1973. The Age of Energy. New York: Viking Press.
Kammen, M. 1987. A Machine That Would Go of Itself. New York: Knopf.
Kelman, S. 1988. “Why Public Ideas Matter.” In The Power of Public Ideas, R. Reich, ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Latour, B. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Ledewitz, B. 1998. “Establishing a Federal Constitutional Right to a Healthy Environment in US and in Our Posterity.” Mississippi Law Journal 68:2.
Leopold, A. 1966. A Sand County Almanac. New York: Ballantine Books.
Matthews, R. 1995. If Men Were Angels. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press.
McKibben, B. 2003. Enough. New York: Times Books.
McNeill, J. R. 2000. Something New under the Sun. New York: Norton.
Raffensperger, C., and J. Tickner. 1999. Protecting Public Health and the Environment. Washington, DC: Island Press.
Stone, C. 1974. Should Trees Have Standing? Los Altos, CA: William Kaufman.
Sunstein, C. 2001. Designing Democracy. New York: Oxford University Press.
Sunstein, C. 1993. The Partial Constitution. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Thornton, J. 2000. Pandora’s Poison. Cambridge: MIT Press.
U.S. Geological Survey. 1998. Status and Trends of the Nation’s Biological Resources. 2 vol. Washington, DC: Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office.
Wilson, E. O. 1984. Biophilia. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Zakaria, F. 2003. The Future of Freedom. New York: Norton.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2011 David W. Orr
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Orr, D.W. (2011). The Constitution of Nature (2003). In: Hope is an Imperative. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-017-0_14
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-017-0_14
Publisher Name: Island Press, Washington, DC
Online ISBN: 978-1-61091-017-0
eBook Packages: Earth and Environmental ScienceEarth and Environmental Science (R0)
