Callicott began his career as an academic philosopher in 1966 at Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis). There, as faculty advisor to the Black Students Association, he was active in the Southern Civil Rights Movement during the time of Martin Luther King Jr.’s last campaigns in the area. In 1969, Callicott joined the philosophy department of Wisconsin State University-Stevens Point (now the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point). As “an expatriate Southerner, fresh from the pitched battles of the Civil Rights struggle in Memphis, Tennessee,” Callicott believed that “the environment was under wholesale assault from every direction with no surcease in sight” and that “Civil Rights was a cause already won in the republic of ideas and in the courts (if not on Main Street in Memphis).” He “was a concerned citizen, but was also, more particularly, a challenged philosopher.” So Callicott asked “how, as a philosopher, [he could contribute to a rethinking of human nature and a reconstruction of human values to help bring them into line with the relatively new ideas about the nature of the environment emerging from ecology and the new physics.”