One of the essential contentions of The Nature of College is that most of us don’t know what our environmental values really are. We think that environmental values are the ones that value the health of the environment, but we forget that all of our values have environmental implications, and that most of them aren’t necessarily healthy. As David Orr says, “All values are environmental values.” And as the chart on page 8 of The Nature of College suggests, the primary environmental values of college culture aren’t that good for the environment.

Dr. America has also contemplated the nature of our values, and the ways that our values affect nature, including human nature. In this set of essays, some of which appeared first in Clergy Journal, Dr. America explores some of the common-sense American environmental values, with sometimes surprising results.