Several recent authors have recommended that “sense of place” should become an important concept in our evaluation of environmental policies. In this paper, we explore aspects of this concept, arguing that it may provide the basis for a new, “place-based” approach to environmental values. This approach is based on an empirical hypothesis that place orientation is a feature of all people’s experience of their environment. We argue that place orientation requires, in addition to a home perspective, a sense of the (...) space around the home place and that this dual aspect can be modeled using a “hierarchical” methodology. We propose a “triscalar,” place-oriented system for the analysis of environmental values, explore the characteristics of place-orientation through several examples, and employ these characteristics to distinguish acceptable and unacceptable aspects of the NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) idea. (shrink)

Several recent authors have recommended that “sense of place” should become an important concept in our evaluation of environmental policies. In this paper, we explore aspects of this concept, arguing that it may provide the basis for a new, “place-based” approach to environmental values. This approach is based on an empirical hypothesis that place orientation is a feature of all people’s experience of their environment. We argue that place orientation requires, in addition to a home perspective, a sense of the (...) space around the home place and that this dual aspect can be modeled using a “hierarchical” methodology. We propose a “triscalar,” place-oriented system for the analysis of environmental values, explore the characteristics of place-orientation through several examples, and employ these characteristics to distinguish acceptable and unacceptable aspects of the NIMBY (not-in-my-backyard) idea. (shrink)

Since its inception in the years following World War II, the green revolution has been defended, not just as a technical program designed to alleviate world hunger, but on moral grounds as a program to achieve world peace. In this paper, I dispute the moral claim to a politics of peace, arguing instead that the green revolution is warist in its treatment of the environment and indigenous communities, and that the agricultural practices that the green revolution was designed to supplant—principally (...) indigenous women’s agriculture—are forms of ecological peacemaking, akin to pacifism. I argue, as well, that the warist intentions of the green revolution are characteristic of a form of domination called developmentalism. A complete understanding of domination necessitates linking developmentalism with other forms of domination such as racism, sexism, and naturism. (shrink)

Do appeals to rights and/or interests of the members of future generations provide an adequate basis for an environmental ethic? Assuming that rights and interests are, semantically, individualistic concepts, I present an argument following Derek Parfit which shows that a policy of depletion may harm no existing individuals, present or future. Although this argument has, initially, an air of paradox, I showthat the argument has two intuitive analogues-the problem ofgenerating a morally justified and environmentally sound population policy and the problem (...) of temporal distance. These problems are shown both to resist solutions in individualistic terms and to embody difficulties similar to those raised by Parfit. Since utilitarianism and modem deontology are individualistic in nature, they cannot provide the basis for an adequate environmental ethic and they do not rule out policies such as that of depletion, which is clearly unacceptable environmentally. I dose with an exploratory but generally pessimistic assessment of the possibility that rights and interests can be reconstrued as nonindividualistic. (shrink)