Abstract:
David Greig, one of the pioneering playwrights of the contemporary Scottish theater, deals
with such issues as Scottish identity, globalization, war, and the environment in his plays. His play
Outlying Islands mobilizes these issues together to question the ethics of the human-nature
relationship. It demonstrates humanity’s adverse impact on nature through a military anthrax test
to be conducted on an island before the WWII. The aim of this paper is to display the stances of the
characters in terms of environmental ethics by using Aldo Leopold’s ‘land ethic’ and Arne Naess’
deep ecological thought as a theoretical framework. Their notions provide a convenient
perspective for the exegesis of the play, for they deny the image of humanity as independent of
nature. Within this framework, this paper discusses whether the characters adopt an intrinsic
value system for the nonhuman beings, and the role of science and religion in the formation of
their value systems is demonstrated.
