The Gardener's Dirty Hands Environmental Politics and Christian Ethics

"Noah Toly offers an interpretation of environmental politics that draws upon Christian theological 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 nature of the human, which arises from humanity's great powers of thought and technological mastery combined with a greater capacity to err than that of other species, in responding to intractable or 'wicked' problems of environmental politics. He suggests that Christians have unique symbolic resources - including the cruciform identity of Christ/the Church - to enable societies to exercise power over the environment responsibly while acknowledging the need for mutually agreed, and ultimately normative, legal, restraints"--