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Geographical Journal Vol. 175 No. 1, pp. 85–92, 2009© 2009 The Author(s). Journal compilation © 2009 The Royal Geographical Society

to the separate chapters tend to repeat points, dueto each author’s attempt to contextualise his/herindividual chapter. These criticisms are minor inwhat is an approachable and informative work.

In summary, this book is a timely addition toongoing work in the emerging discipline of thehistory of cartography. This is an accessible bookfor undergraduates (and I will be recommending itto mine) and for others new to the field. The bookoffers an avenue into a variety of European andtraditional cartographies, which can be followed upthrough the wide-ranging bibliography.

HEATHER WINLOW, Departmentof Geography, Bath Spa University

GIS for Environmental Decision-Making. Edited byANDREW LOVETT AND KATY APPLETON

London: CRC Press, 2008, 259 pp, £54.99 ISBN0-8493-7423-5

GIS for Environmental Decision-Making is the 12thin the Innovations in GIS series of edited booksbased on the GIS Research UK Conference series.This volume includes selected papers from the2004 conference held at the University of EastAnglia (as well as two invited contributions) andfocuses on a timely theme of the conference; namelythe application of GIS in addressing environmentalproblems. The volume consists of a brief introductorysection and 14 chapters organised into threesections that represent three major strands of GISresearch in this area, related to recent develop-ments in data acquisition (three chapters), researchconcerning tools such as Grid-enabled GIS (sixchapters) and research that aims to incorporatepublic participation into the environmental decision-making process through IT approaches (five chapters).Although there is some almost inevitable overlapin the material presented, this represents a logicaland coherent structure that demonstrates the crosssection of research that is being carried out primarilyin UK universities (although there are a number ofinternational contributors from Switzerland, Spain,Australia and New Zealand, among others). Thebook is well illustrated and the chapters generallywritten to a high standard, although some of thefigures are difficult to interpret and could havebenefited from the use of colour (to distinguish,for example, suitability maps with 10 gradations ofgrey in chapter five) or increased in dimensions.

Earlier chapters in the book such as that ofTompkinson et al. (chapter 2) cover important areasin the derivation of environmental data basedaround detailed topographic datasets that havecome on stream in the last 5 years or so in the UK

using new and innovative methodologies. A primaryfocus of the book, however, is on GIS-basedmodelling and visualisation and in particular theirapplication in participatory environments to enhancedecision-making. This is demonstrated throughexamples in coastal erosion (Brown et al.), inrenewable energy planning (MacFarlane and Dunsford;Miller et al.) and in potentially reducing land useconflicts in tropical forest areas (Shutidamrongand Lovett). This reflects not just technical devel-opments such as distributed GIS and mobilecomputing, but also serves to illustrate how suchtechniques can enhance the role of stakeholdergroups and the public in decisions which affecttheir communities at the local level as well as havean input into wider global issues. While technicalissues and new methodological approaches basedaround GIS are to the fore, these contributionsalso hint at the importance of wider issues of dataand computer access as well as the role of suchtools in attaining consensus in areas such as land-useplanning (i.e. the types of ‘grand challenges’alluded to by the editors in their opening chapter).

The GISRUK conference series continues toinclude the work of researchers that are at thecutting edge of GIS research in a range of applicationareas. Previous volumes in the series have includedcontributions that have demonstrated the richnessof research related to such themes and, althoughsuch a volume can only ever include a snapshot ofsuch research, the book overall succeeds in doingjustice to the vitality of the research that is beingcarried out in this arena.

GARY HIGGS, GIS Research Centre, Faculty ofAdvanced Technology, University of Glamorgan

Environmental Values. By JOHN O’NEILL, ALAN HOLLAND

AND ANDREW LIGHT

London and New York: Routledge, 2007, 233 pp,£76.00 (hardback) ISBN 13-978-0415145084, £21.99(paperback) ISBN 13-978-0415145091

Environmental Values is a significant book for thoseworking across a wide range of environmentalfields. All three authors of this book are philoso-phers, but this should not deter those from otherdisciplines from tackling it; the book is exception-ally clearly written, and the environmental policyissues it discusses are of first importance. In brief,the authors of Environmental Values argue thatwe need to rethink dominant approaches toenvironmental decision-making, for these appro-aches are based on thin, inadequate conceptions ofwhat is valuable about the environment. Instead,our decisions need to be informed by a much

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richer, pluralist, and narrative-oriented understandingof environmental value.

In order to construct the different elements ofthis argument clearly, the book is divided intothree sections. The first two sections outline andcritique the leading approaches to environmentaldecision-making to be rejected by the authors; whilethe final section develops their own, alternativeapproach. What are these rejected approaches toenvironmental decision-making, and why are theyrejected? First, the authors turn to broadly utilitarianmethods of decision-making, in particular to cost–benefit analysis, which they characterise as conse-quentialist, welfarist and maximising. All three ofthese characteristics, the authors argue, areproblematic. Consequentialist approaches to decision-making focus only on outcomes. On this view,there are no built-in constraints on actions, or actsone ought not to perform; and by always lookingforward to outcomes we can miss what is meaningfuland valuable about the past. Welfarism – conceivedin the way that is dominant in cost–benefit analysis– is problematic because it is oriented aroundpreference satisfaction. But, the authors argue,preference satisfaction is not what determineshuman welfare. Rather, they maintain ‘we preferthings because we believe them to be good’ (p.25); that is, welfare is about the fulfillment ofcertain objective human goods, not about thesatisfaction of preferences. The maximising aspectis also problematic, since a maximising approachdoes not obviously take account of distribution: thebest overall outcome may be one that is highlyinegalitarian. What is revealed in this welfarist,maximising account of environmental decision-making, the authors argue, is dependence on theideas of value monism and value commensurability.The use of ‘willingness to pay’ as a proxy forpreference satisfaction in cost–benefit analysisperfectly illustrates this. Money becomes a currencythat allows trade-offs between preferences, andthus can produce a single ‘best outcome’. But, theauthors argue, this form of decision-making ismistaken in several ways. There are some valuesthat can never be traded off, and even to enter intofinancial negotiation about them would be an actof betrayal. And there are many incommensurableforms of value. Indeed, where choices betweenvalues must be made, decisions may be truly tragic,creating the kind of loss that just cannot show upin an aggregative, calculative, outcome-orientedapproach to decision-making.

The second section of the book turns to alternativeways of thinking about environmental values: thosethat have emerged from the growing subdisciplineof environmental ethics. Environmental ethicistshave proposed quite diverse and conflicting views

of environmental value, some focusing on the valueof sentient animals, others on individual livingthings, yet others on species, ecological communitiesor ‘nature’ itself; and O’Neill, Holland and Lightprovide an extremely useful overview of a range ofdifferent positions and debates in environmentalethics. They maintain, however, that all theseapproaches share a critical flaw. They focus on oneor other of only two key questions: the questionwho or what has ‘moral considerability’, and thequestion whether nature, or some aspect of it, hasintrinsic value. Once we have answered thesequestions (however, as the authors make clear,even the questions are by no means straightforward)on standard approaches to environmental ethics,we should be able to derive our environmentaldecisions from them. But for the authors, this wayof arriving at environmental decisions – derivingthem from ‘ethical primitives’ – should be rejected.The ideas of ‘moral considerability’ and ‘intrinsicvalue’ are far too thin and abstract to capture whatis really at stake in decisions about conservationand the environment. They fail to come anywherenear reflecting ‘the thick and plural ethical vocabu-laries which our everyday encounters with humanand non-human worlds evoke’ (p. 109).

The discussion of environmental ethics assists inthe development of the authors’ own position. Wehave already seen that they adopt an objectiveaccount of human welfare or flourishing. It is thisidea of human flourishing that, they maintain, isthe lynchpin for thinking about environmentalvalues and our relations to other creatures, ratherthan the thin concepts of moral considerability andintrinsic value: ‘The flourishing of living thingsought to be promoted because care for that flour-ishing, and the meaningful relationships with thoseother living things of which this care is an expression,is constitutive of our own flourishing’ (p. 120). It isdeveloping this perspective that occupies the finalsection of the book.

How, then, should we go about making environ-mental decisions? The authors fight shy of givingus a formula to apply; in fact, they suggest, theprovision of a formula is exactly one of theproblems with the approaches they reject. Rather,in the third section of the book, they outline anumber of neglected considerations that, theyargue, need to be taken into account when makingenvironmental policy in particular (and differing)contexts. Outstanding among these considerationsare the recognition of value pluralism and theimportance of history and narrative. In any partic-ular circumstance there might be a number ofdifferent values at stake; this diversity should berecognised, not suppressed or translated into somesingle value type. And when we think about how

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we should interact with particular places, we needto think about their very specific histories, theirmeaning to human communities and the existinghuman ‘narratives’ of the place. For key to environ-mental policymaking – in particular, environmentalconservation – the authors argue, is how tocontinue the narrative of a particular place. Thatmeans looking backward at history as well asforward at outcomes, and thinking about the richtapestry of human/non-human relations in a place(including the relations of aboriginal peoples tosuch places, relations often airbrushed from history).To reach these kinds of environmental decisions,we don’t need a process of calculation, as cost–benefitanalysis would suggest, but rather a process ofdeliberation, in which it is recognised that actsare expressive of relations, not merely means toproduce outcomes.

Environmental Values makes an extremely impor-tant contribution to environmental philosophy,and to the study of the environment more broadly.Many of its bold arguments, however, are likely toprove controversial. In theoretical terms, theauthors’ advocacy of a form of virtue ethics – whilean increasingly popular position in environmentalphilosophy – will cause some hackles to rise. Inparticular, the authors’ argument that the flourishing

of living things should be promoted because suchflourishing is constitutive of human flourishing will(not unreasonably) be taken as a reassertion ofanthropocentrism (however, the authors resist anysimplistic reasoning of this kind). In policy terms,their suggestion that exotic plants and animalsmay become part of the story of a place, andshould not necessarily be eliminated, controversiallyresists much current environmental policy. And Iwondered how the authors would respond to thecriticism that they were too place oriented, andthat (for instance) this place orientation wouldjustify resistance to developments such as nuclearpower stations or wind farms that (it might beargued) are needed on broader environmental grounds,but which would surely dramatically disrupt anarrative of place.

To conclude, Environmental Values covers anextraordinary amount of ground with clarity andprecision. It distils key ideas from three leadingthinkers in environmental philosophy into one tightlyargued volume. It offers both careful, accuratesummaries of existing positions and an original,stimulating position of its own. I highly recommendit.CLARE PALMER, Philosophy and Environmental Studies,

Washington University in St Louis, MO