In the Media

Jedediah Purdy’s 2015 book After Nature is about what we talk about when we talk about nature. Breaking the concept apart—historically, legally, philosophically, even aesthetically—Purdy makes us see that there’s nothing “natural” about nature, that the world is what humanity has made it. . . . Purdy is currently a law professor at Columbia University.

By Jedediah Britton-Purdy
The global hypercapitalism that Berry denounces has involved life—human and otherwise—in a world-historical gamble concerning the effects of indefinite growth, innovation, and competition. Most of us are not the gamblers; we are the stakes. He reminds us that this gamble repeats an old pattern of mistakes and crimes: hubris and conquest, the idea that the world is here for human convenience, and the willingness of the powerful to take as much as they can.

By Jedediah Britton-Purdy
Since the literal frontier closed more than a century ago, the conceit of limitlessness has served to justify expanding America’s borders into first a worldwide military empire and then commercial globalization.