The Spinoza Controversy in some ways typified the rapid change (and reactions against change), sense of crisis yet also excitement, and extraordinary intellectual productivity characterizing its era. The Controversy also featured an important radical disjuncture between those who opposed, and those who supported (and were helping to create), a new type of Western naturalism emerging as the Enlightenment waned. In this book I will endeavor to show the unexpected richness that rethinking the Controversy can bring to environmental philosophy, what the Controversy implies about the possible future direction of Western theories of nature as a single whole, and the way the Controversy’s terms crystallize the stark environmental either/or before us in the twenty-first century.