The Ways that Nature Matters: The World and the Earth in the Thought of Hannah Arendt

Abstract

One of the many sets of distinctions made by Hannah Arendt was that between the world and the earth. I give two different interpretations of this distinction then set out four different ways in which nature matters to us, depending on whether nature is regarded as world or as earth, and whether humans are seen as biological beings or as beings who create and inhabit a world. These different ways are represented in different forms of environmentalism and theories of environmental ethics. The controversy over wind farms in the UK as an instance in which two of the different ways that nature matters come into conflict with each other.