Growing alarm in both the public and academic worlds over the harm done by human society to other creatures, to the natural environment, and even to our own species has created a practical dilemma about whether and how industrial civilization can be sustained. That dilemma compels us to ask the deeper moral question, What should be the human relationship to nature? Three contrasting patterns of moral reasoning about how to answer that question are described and assessed: the Progress Ethic that created the world we live in, the biblically-inspired Stewardship Ethic which aims to balance human dominion over nature with our responsibility to care for it, and the Connection Ethic rooted in scientific understanding of the interdependency of all natural entities, among which humans have no special claim. Yet critical analysis reveals that none of these is able to justify or sustain the values it holds dear. These problems have a common root in two unsupportable presumptions: that the values promoted by human morality are commensurate with the natural world, and that the value of an entity is an intrinsic property. If these widely-held ideas are themselves in doubt, then environmental ethics faces a theoretical as well as practical crisis. In order to both be logically coherent and contribute constructively, future environmental ethics must start from unconventional notions: First, nature will never be commensurate with human moral reasoning, and therefore we need to employ non-rational resources despite the risks this involves, and second, value resides in the relation of one entity to another, and does not belong intrinsically to either entity in short, value is first and foremost a verb, not a noun. This alternative foundation is enough on which to begin building a fourth environmental ethical paradigm. Several components of such an ethic are proposed, including the notion of a realm of value, composed of all value relations among all natural entities, which offers mediating opportunities between the realm of nature and the realm of morality, the notion that not only humans but many entities participate as both subject and object in multiple, and ultimately incomparable, value relations with other entities, and the notion that in the pursuit of moral ends, there are some objects and value relations worthy of faith even when unsupported by reason. But there is no getting around several reasons why, in such a new ethic, there are no shoulds. Instead, all moral responsibilities are elective, placing us in a new and unfamiliar relationship, initially alarming but potentially liberating, to the natural entities around us. This book will be of interest to scholars working in environmental ethics, as well as ethics, religion, theology, intellectual history and cultural studies.