Ben A. Minteer holds the Arizona Zoological Society Endowed at Arizona State University, where he is also Professor of Environmental Ethics and Conservation in ASU’s School of Life Sciences. His work grapples with two big questions: What obligations do we have toward species and wildlands in a rapidly changing and increasingly human-shaped environment? And how can a better understanding of the American conservation tradition enhance our efforts to secure a biologically and culturally rich environmental future? His writing is grounded in the tradition of American Pragmatism, especially its moral, scientific, and civic traditions.
Minteer has authored more than seventy articles, essays, and book chapters on these subjects and his work has appeared in Science, Nature, PNAS, BioScience, Conservation Biology, Environmental Ethics, Slate, and Earth Island Journal, among other outlets. He is the co-editor of The Ark and Beyond: The Evolution of Zoo and Aquarium Conservation (University of Chicago Press) and he has also authored a number of books, including The Fall of the Wild: Extinction, De-Extinction, and the Ethics of Conservation (Columbia University Press); After Preservation: Saving American Nature in the Age of Humans (University of Chicago Press); Refounding Environmental Ethics: Pragmatism, Principle, and Practice (Temple University Press); and The Landscape of Reform: Civic Pragmatism and Environmental Thought in America (MIT Press).
His Center project, Wild Visions: Imaging and Imagining the American Wilderness, is a photographically-driven reflection on the evolution of the venerable wilderness idea, ethic, and aesthetic. A collaboration with the landscape photographer Mark Klett and environmental historian Steve Pyne, the volume will be prepared for the University of Chicago Press and will be accompanied by a public exhibition of classic and contemporary photographic work on the changing nature of wild in the American tradition.
Contributions to Humans & Nature:
- Extinct Species Should Stay Extinct
A response to “How far should we go to bring back lost species?” - The Perils of De-extinction
From Minding Nature’s January 2015, Volume 8, Number 1 issue
Noteworthy Links:
- Ben A. Minteer
Visit Ben A. Minteer’s personal website.
