Ames, Roger T. "Taoism and the Nature of Nature." Environmental  Ethics 8, no. 4 (Winter 1986): 317-50.

Abstract

The problems of environmental ethics are so basic that the exploration of an alternative metaphysics or attendant ethical theory is not a sufficiently radical solution. In fact, the assumptions entailed in a definition of systematic philosophy that gives us a tradition of metaphysics might themselves be the source of the current crisis. We might need to revision the responsibilities of the philosopher and think in terms of the artist rather than the "scientific of first principles." Taoism proceeds from art rather than science, and produces and ars contectualis: generalizations drawn from human experience in the most basic processes of making a person, making a community and making a world. This idea of an "aesthetic cosmology" is one basis for redefining the nature of the relatedness that obtains between particular and world--between tao and te.