Environmental Ethics

Volume 22, Issue 1, Spring 2000

The Ethics of “Place”
Reflections on Bioregionalism

The idea of “place” has become a topic of growing interest in environmental ethics literature. I explore a variety of issues surrounding the conceptualization of “place” in bioregional theory. I show that there is a necessary vagueness in bioregional definitions of region or place because these concepts elude any purely objective, geographically literal categorization. I argue that this elusiveness is in fact a great merit because it calls attention to a more essential “subjective” and experiential geography of place. I use a reading of Aldo Leopold’s Sand Country Almanac as an example of the value of a non-literalistic geography for the understanding of place