Forest Sovereignty: Wildlife Sustainability and Ethics

"Forest Sovereignty is a startling new book reconsidering our relationship to nature. Tague has written a nonfiction version of Richard Powers's novel The Overstory. His careful, confident textual dismantling of the liberal-conventional account of private property gives way to something more elemental. Tague speaks for the trees." - Clayton Shoppa, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy, St. Francis College

"Forest Sovereignty rereads political philosophy from Hobbes to Marx to advance an incisive theory of forest freedom recognizing the mutualistic self-governance of fungi, flora, and fauna. Passionately argued, the book issues a timely call for preserving and expanding the planet's remaining great forests while radically greening humankind's increasingly urban future." - John C. Ryan, Ph.D., Nulungu Institute, University of Notre Dame, Australia

The book examines plants, animals, and political philosophy in a claim for a forest state of Gaia. It argues that humans should set aside and leave to their growth vast tracts of forests, wetlands, and grasslands. Biologists surmise that immense and undisturbed interlocking networks of forests, wetlands, grasslands, seas, oceans, etc. constitute a thermodynamic system of atmospheric integrity maintaining environmental health. Modern human mechanical intrusion into nature’s realm has upset planetary homeostasis. One path to reestablishing climate fitness would not only be to preserve what remains but also to rewild additional forest, wetland, and grassland areas. There’s an ethical claim in saying forests have incalculable value because their intrinsic qualities of growth, metamorphosis, and decay are instrumental in creating and maintaining healthy ecosystems that constitute earth’s biosphere.

• Publication date: 31 July 2025
• Page count: 218
• Dimensions: Height 229 mm; Width 152 mm
• Publisher: Peter Lang International Academic Publishers
• Format: Hardback
• ISBN-13: 9781803749556