Environmental ethics emerged as a new subdiscipline of philosophy in the early 1970s. It arose as a response to the widespread perception of an "environmental crisis" in the 1960s. The inspiration for a systematic exploration of environmental ethics was Lynn White Jr.'s (in)famous article, "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis," published in Science in 1967. In this article White laid the blame for the "ecologic crisis" at the doorstep of the Judeo-Christian worldview—in which "man" is exclusively created in the image of God, given "dominion" over the earth (and all its creatures), and commanded to subdue it. In retrospect, of course, White's central and narrowly focused thesis seems jejune and cavalier. He claims that the Judeo-Christian worldview is anthropocentric, while the fragments of text from Genesis on which he bases his interpretation seem to be...