A LOCAL APPROACH TO HOLISTIC ENVIRONMENTALISM:

BIOREGIONALISM, CULTURAL IDENTITY AND ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS

Dominique Alejandra Waissbluth Kingma

ORCID 0000-0002-7786-3504

Master of Arts (Advanced Seminar and Shorter Thesis)

School of History and Philosophical Studies

University of Melbourne

Australia

February 2017

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Abstract

In this work, I elaborate a local approach to holistic environmentalism. This view proposes a holistic understanding of environmental ethical problems that result from the interaction between communities and their surroundings. In particular, as I propose to present it, local holistic environmentalism seeks to account for the ethical dimension of such interaction. Throughout my argument, after offering brief introductory remarks in Chapter 1, I clarify in Chapter 2 what I understand by cultural identity and the environmental problems it involves. In Chapter 3, I examine bioregionalism as a kind of ecophilosophy. I put forward criticisms of this view in order to advance, in Chapter 4, a moderate version of bioregionalism. In Chapter 5, I firstly outline the standard notion of holistic environmentalism and explain how it can help to understand the relationship between communities and their environments. Secondly, I look into Kolers’ views on territorial attachment in ethnogeography, highlighting the importance of a close relationship with the environment. This illustrates the step towards the issue of how communities value the environment in which they dwell. Overall, I conclude that the local reading of holistic environmentalism offers an alternative approach to environmental issues by considering human communities as members and not dominators of the environment.

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Declaration

This is to certify that:

i. This thesis comprises only my original work towards the Master of Arts (Advanced Seminar & Shorter Thesis), except where indicated in the preface; ii. Due acknowledgement has been made in the text to all other material used; iii. The thesis is fewer than 22,000 words, exclusive of tables, maps, bibliographies and appendices.

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Dedicatory

This thesis would have not seen the light were it not for my fellow philosopher and husband, Cristian Soto-Herrera. I am in great debt to him for all the times he has listened to my arguments and the many times he read drafts of this thesis. I also thank him for his ability to see through the mess of my mind and direct me to the right path.

I also want to dedicate this work to my grandmother Adriana Hayne Etcheverry. Anywhere I go, your memory has held me strong. Thanks for living in my smile.

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Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to my supervisor, professor Andrew Alexandra, for all the support and guidance he provided me throughout my entire research. Thanks to him I have completed this work successfully.

I also want to thank my fellow postgraduate philosophers Cristian, Chloe, Kai, Rebecca, Sean, Alex, Salman, Ari, Madhi, Tristram and Shannon. Not only did they help me with their insights and comments, but also helped me navigate in every sense the University of Melbourne.

I am grateful as well to Dominic Lenzi and Marilyn Stendera, fellow postgraduate philosophers at the University of Melbourne as well, for all the conversations, remarks and clarifications on my work in our private conversations, and for the small things that they did in order to help me through these years.

The University of Melbourne granted me the Melbourne International Research Scholarship and the Melbourne International Fee Remission Scholarship, allowing me to pursue my studies over the period of 2014 – 2016.

Last but not least, I want to thank the Hawthorn-Melbourne English Language Centre, from the University of Melbourne, whose English academic program enabled me to achieve the necessary academic English skills I required for carrying out my research.

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Table of Contents

1. Introductory Remarks 8

1.1. On the Prospects of Local Holistic Environmentalism: Communities and 8 their Environment 10 1.2. Structure of This Thesis

2. Philosophical Issues Regarding the Relationship between Cultural Identity at a 12 Community Level and the Environment

3. An Outline of Bioregionalism 20

3.1. Reading Bioregionalism from the Perspective of Environmental Ethics 20

3.2. People and Locality: A First Reference to the Yaganes Community 26

3.3. How to Plan a Bioregion 28

4. On the Critical Reception of Bioregionalism: a Sketch of a Moderate Version 33

4.1. Concerns Regarding Bioregionalism 33

4.2 A Sketch of Moderate Bioregionalism 39

5. A Local Reading of Holistic Environmentalism 42

5.1. What Is Holistic Environmentalism? 42

5.2. Drawing Considerations from Ethnogeography 47

5.2.1. Attachment 47

5.2.2. What ethnogeography teaches us 50

5.3. Local Holistic Environmentalism 53

6. Concluding Remarks 62

Bibliographic References 66

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1. Introductory Remarks

1.1. On the prospects of Local Holistic Environmentalism: Communities and their Environment

The question I address goes as follows: Can a local reading of holistic1 environmentalism help us understand ethical concerns that arise from the relationship between communities and their environment? In order to clarify why and how this research falls into the category of environmental ethics, I will keep in mind a standard definition of the discipline, which states that environmental ethics is “the discipline that studies the moral relationship of human beings to, and also the value and moral status of, the environment and its nonhuman contents” (See Brennan and Lo 2011, Abstract).

Of course, there is more depth to what can be understood as environmental ethics. Yet, for the sake of this thesis length, I will only superficially show in which main areas of the different schools of thought my local reading of holistic environmentalism is circumscribed: In relationship with the discussion between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism2, local holistic environmentalism fits in the ecocentrism spectrum and this is mainly because of its holistic aspect. However, it also shows some features of anthropocentrism in the sense that, the view is focused on how human dwelling could be more environmentally friendly. Additionally, since locality is a very important part of this thesis, contextualism is one subdivision of environmental ethics that encompasses a local holistic environmentalism.

As a first step, holistic environmentalism is to be understood as a view that offers an inclusive approach to environmental ethics. This approach should be distinguished from the position from the Croatian Journal The Holistic Approach to Environment that suggests interpreting holistic environmentalism as just encouraging an “amicable co- existence of all beings on Earth”.3 By contrast, I advocate that the relationship between

1 With the concept holism I will primarily understand the interconnectedness of all entities. Afterwards in Ch.5 when talking about the interests of entities I will consider the notion as leading up to the claim that the moral status of different entities works holistically. Finally, in section 5.3 the idea of holism will encompass interconnectedness and the necessity of working in an interdisciplinary manner. 2 I am using the term ecocentrism instead of biocentrism to include in the concept not only the fauna, flora, humans and non-human animals, but also things like the landscape and watersheds. 3 See http://www.cpo.hr/naslovna.html. Although I agree with the general intention of this journal, especially regarding the emphasis on interdisciplinary sources, I do not use its notion of friendly

8 communities and their environment is deeper than the sole “amicable co-existence”, particularly since – for reasons I discuss below – the interaction under consideration has to take place in a fluent and meaningful manner. To this end, with holism I want to emphasise the idea that humans are part and parcel of the environment. In this regard, I undertake in Chapter 5 the elaboration and defence of a local approximation to holistic environmentalism rather than considering it in a more global fashion. Along the way of my argument, it will come to be clear that local holistic environmentalism concentrates on local nature-related constraints in order to raise awareness about ethical concerns, although it should not be understood as suggesting the claim that global environmental constraints are not relevant or that they need to be dismissed.

The scope of the various arguments throughout the following chapters related to the local reading of holistic environmentalism can be assessed from different perspectives. The perspectives I want to highlight is the following: local holistic environmentalism encourages us to situate human communities in a sought-after balanced relationship with their surrounding nature emphasising the role of their communities’ attachments to the place in which they dwell. In this respect, I will examine the notion of cultural identity in order to understand in a deeper manner the relationship between communities and their environment. In particular, I aim to show that the examination of the notion of cultural identity is of philosophical relevance so long as it sheds light on central issues in the current debate on environmental ethics.

Different communities can develop in various manners, allowing the possibility of building specific cultural identities in relation to various factors. Given that local holistic environmentalism takes into consideration the geographical and climatic conditions, the idea of such conditions having an influence on shaping the cultural identity of communities emerges as a substantial component of the present research. To be sure, this does not imply that geographical location and climatic factors are the only aspects deciding the process of shaping a community’s cultural identity. What is claimed is that they are the aspects that are usually overlooked in ethical analyses, regardless of their importance for the way in which communities conceive of themselves. Accordingly, granted that we are part of the environment, a moral concern emerges as to why we should try to interact with it in a manner that is not only beneficial to humans but to the environment as well. Hence, cultural identity comes to be a key element in our

coexistence. T his is basically because such argument depicts shallowly what I want to portray with a local reading of holistic environmentalism.

9 understanding of the way in which communities interact with, and value, their surrounding nature.

Another discussion I will examine is that of bioregionalism. Even though debates about bioregionalism find their original motivations in political movements in the United States of America (see McGinnis 1999, p. 22), in recent years it has regained a powerful philosophical purport in various respects. In this research, I take bioregionalism to be relevant when it comes to the examination of the relationship between both cultural identity and environmental ethics. Likewise, I look into arguments in political philosophy which will enable an explanation of the connection between cultural identity and the way in which particular communities identify themselves with their land and attribute ethical value to their surroundings.

I discuss ideas advocated by Avery Kolers (2009) about territorial attachment in ethnogeography. Kolers’ arguments nicely illustrate how different communities develop a sense of belonging to the place they inhabit. This is important for my purposes, so long as it reflects one step towards the issue of valuing the environment that we dwell in. In other words, I emphasise the relevance of having this sense of being part of a particular environment in order to raise an ethical stance and care for it. At the community level, it is easier to value, protect and care for the environment when people experience a sense of belonging to the place they inhabit.

1.2. Structure of this Thesis

Chapter 2 advances clarifications about our understanding of the notion of cultural identity. After discussing the main features of this concept and outlining a specific understanding of this notion, I proceed to examine the influence of geo-climatic factors on the formation of cultural identities. In view of this, I explore ideas firstly developed by Herder (1966 [1784]), who addressed this concern at the end of the 18th century. Although Herder made use of the idea of cultural identity to establish a specific understanding of the history of humankind, I will restrict my analysis to his remarks on the influence of climate and geographic location on the development of communities.

Chapter 3 examines bioregionalism. I propose to understand this view as within the scope of ecophilosophy that proposes an interesting – though problematic (see

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Chapter 4) – line of argument regarding central issues in environmental ethics. I outline and analyse some definitions of this doctrine by Sale (1996) and Thayer (2003), which will help us determine the overall aim and scope of bioregionalism.

In Chapter 4, I explore critical approaches to bioregionalism put forward by Brennan (1998) and Kovel (2007). I do so in order to introduce another version of this view, which I call ‘moderate bioregionalism’. I will assess whether moderate bioregionalism has the means to tackle some of the main problems undermining standard bioregionalism. Yet, moderate bioregionalism does not pretend to come up with a thorough solution to such problems. Instead, it focuses on alternative argumentative strategies. Among these, one alternative strategy will be to drop the political ambition of standard bioregionalism, especially given that the latter introduces the issue of homogenisation of communities, among other problems. Moreover, moderate bioregionalism appears to account for a more appropriate sense of belonging that some communities experience toward their land and the consequences that this has for dwellers. Moderate bioregionalism manages to deliver a sound narrative about such phenomenon without introducing the risk of extreme views, which usually accompany standard bioregionalism.

In Chapter 5, I outline the local reading of holistic environmentalism. As it has been described in previous paragraphs, local holistic environmentalism may seem to suggest a contradiction in terms by appealing to both local and holistic considerations. However, note that the local reading is not anti-holistic, so to speak. The reason for this is that by endorsing a holistic approach I intend, on one hand, to embrace the idea that there is a need for more interdisciplinary work; while on the other, the idea that humans belong to the environment and are not the masters of it. This approach, I purpose, should be done from locality, which means to develop an understanding of the interaction between the members of particular communities and their specific environment from a local perspective, rather than a global one.

I conclude my research in Chapter 6 by summarising the main ideas, problems and prospects for further research of local holistic environmentalism.

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2. Philosophical Issues Regarding the Relationship between Cultural Identity at a Community Level and the Environment

A main part of this research relies on the idea that both climate and geography contribute to determine the ways in which communities develop their cultural identities. The scope of this influence will be specified later in this chapter. First, it is necessary to better understand what it is meant by the notion of cultural identity, since its role as a link between humans and a more meaningful connection with their environment is vital in a local reading of holistic environmentalism. Let me begin with some definitions of the concept available in the relevant literature.

According to Hall (1990), cultural identities are collective forms of identity referring to culturally defined characteristics that are meaningless if they are not shared or reproduced by a group of individuals. For instance, in a previous work (Waissbluth, 2013, p. 11), I had the opportunity to look into the Chilean dwellers of a region called Magallanes y Antártica Chilena. In that work, I examined the reasons for the strong sense of belonging and attachment to the land experienced by its dwellers. The culture, life and identity of such a community, I argued, depend on various geographical, climatic and historical elements. Drawing on Hall (1990), I claimed that the Magellan identity becomes meaningless in its generality without individuals who are constantly recreating it in practice.

Nevertheless, it may be the case that not every single member of a community consistently depicts the same pattern of ideas or behaviours that represent a specific community from a general perspective. Provided that cultural identity is a concept that enriches itself from diversity and from the idiosyncrasies of particular members of specific communities, certain dissidence among members may take place when we look at cultural identity at a local level. The idea of cultural identity in a community encompasses general, shared behaviours but not every person needs to comply with all the aspects of their community. Individuals are essential to communities in the sense that each one contributes with their specific peculiarities to the construction of a shared cultural identity and this does not compromise the collective aspect of what a community is.

There are two general views on cultural identity that are worth mentioning, namely, the essentialist and the historicist. The former takes cultural identity as something inherent to the members of a community, bearing certain features that make

12 up an essential core. Hall (1990, p. 223) defines the essentialist view as a collective ‘one true self’ that is hidden inside the many other ‘selves’ that are comparatively superficial and artificial. By contrast, the historicist view conceives of cultural identity as something that is always in a process of change and is never fully complete (Hall 1990, p. 222).

Morandé (see Larraín, 1994, p. 51) argues that in order to understand the cultural synthesis it is necessary to focus on the relationships of participation and belonging rather than on the relationships of difference and opposition. Morandé’s claims seem akin to the essentialist view on cultural identity. Yet, he does not categorically deny the importance of new input into the identity of communities. No essentialism can deny the role of history and external influences on communities. This leaves open the possibility for explaining how communities change through time and interaction with other communities, while persisting in a certain core identity that differentiates them from the others.

There is abundant discussion on whether essentialism or historicism can best suit a definition of cultural identity. This debate is relevant here, since it reveals how cultural identities form and also it helps identifying which are the factors that act in the shaping of such cultural identities. For the time being, and for the sake of the length of this research, I leave the intricacies of this debate aside. The one thing I want to retain from this discussion is illustrated by Hall’s (1990, p. 225) insight of viewing cultural identity as a matter of ‘being’ as much as of ‘becoming’. Cultural identity encompasses both processes: there are features that make a cultural identity unique while constantly undergoing transformation.

If I were to take a stance on the matter, I would be inclined to endorse a form of historicism that does not deny the differences between communities and their own cultural background. Someone that was born and raised in the Chilean region of Magallanes will have a specific way to identify herself and relate to the place she lives in – considerations about climate and geography will sooner rather than later make their appearance. Although differences among cultural identities may not be clear-cut in every respect, they can be shown to be substantial enough for drawing relevant distinctions.

Cultural identity and community are two concepts that are intertwined in this research. I will make use of the following six elements of communities described in “Conversations on Community Theory” by Wood and Judikis (2002, p. 12) that will allow us to have a first approach to this concept. According to the authors, communities generally show:

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1. A sense of common purpose(s) or interest(s) among members. 2. An assuming of mutual responsibility. 3. Acknowledgement (at least among members) of interconnectedness. 4. Mutual respect for individual differences. 5. Mutual commitment to the wellbeing of each other. 6. Commitment by the members to the integrity and wellbeing of the group, that is, the community itself.

As Wood and Judikis point out, a community needs to have a sense of common purpose or interest. This feature is something with which most people agree and intuitively accept, as the commonality aspect of community grants in the etymological roots of the word (derived from the Latin communis, i.e., common).4 I endorse this point in my reading of cultural identity: the idea of having a common interest is fundamental in order to talk of shared things. A common purpose, on the other hand, might be something more difficult but not impossible to defend especially considering that it is not always the case that every member of a shared cultural identity might endorse the purposes of their respective communities.

The second element seems more controversial than the first, even if it is just considered superficially. It is hard to defend that all the dwellers of a community are always responsible members. With respect to the notion of mutual responsibility, Wood and Judikis (2002, p.13) claim that a community member must at the very least acknowledge that such responsibility exists. I tend to agree with Wood and Judikis in that there must be at least an acknowledgement of responsibilities. Yet, I will argue that this element is so tightly related to the concept of cultural identity that responsibility needs to be actively promoted in community’s members in order to make an attempt to increase environmental awareness at a community level. Regarding this point, I will go into further detail in Chapter 5.

Acknowledging interconnectedness amounts to focusing on the dimension of mutuality of community. That is to say, “the emphasis is on the relationship of members to each other as individuals” (Wood and Judikis, 2002, p.13). Even more, “[a] community is a single entity, but it is also a network of individuals” (Ibid). This element is intertwined with the idea of cultural identity. Both rely not only on a common interest or responsibility

4 See http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=community

14 but on the underlying fact that there must exist something meaningful enough that somehow creates a connection among members of the relevant cultural identity.

Commonality and interconnectedness appear as the keystones for considering something in terms of both community and cultural identity. Although the other four elements on the list are relevant in other respects, I will not pursue a detailed analysis of them – they will only be addressed indirectly throughout this research.

Keeping this in mind, it is necessary to understand that there certainly is no proper way to accurately determine if a group is large enough so as to instantiate a shared cultural identity of a given community. The idea that there are degrees in terms of being a community5 makes this issue flexible and tractable, giving room to the possibility that there may be a variety of groups within a community expressing their own identities and cultural ideologies. Indeed, each one of these sub-groups can complement a broad sense of a cultural identity at the community level.

In general, the rituals and symbols of a community can be considered as the links between different groups that can relate them to a shared cultural identity. Nonetheless, there are other types of links like geo-climate factors, religious holidays, dialects, fauna, flora, flags, gastronomy, and sports, among others. Note, we need not think that to be part of the cultural identity of a specific community every member needs to participate in all the rituals and symbols, or that it is a requirement to feel a strong sense of attachment to all the aspects of such cultural identity. Nonetheless, there is a certain expectation that members acknowledge these rituals, symbols and practices, and at least that there is a partial participation in some of these, so these activities could be considered meaningful enough to create a communal sense of belonging.

Regarding other aspects that come to play when talking about the cultural identity of a community, there are two vectors Hall considers, namely the vector of similarity and continuity, and the vector of difference and rupture (Hall, 1990, pp. 226 – 227). The former gives some foundation and stability in view of the past, whereas the latter reminds us that what we all share is the experience of a deep discontinuity. In other words, difference perseveres in and across continuity.

The relation between past and future is vital to our understanding of cultural identity. On the one hand, this is because the past needs to be accepted in order to

5 See the concepts “quasi-communities”, “pseudo-communities”, “emerging communities” and “momentary communities” (Wood and Judikis, 2002, p. 22).

15 acknowledge the existence of a cultural identity. Yet, it should not be considered as a framing past determining everything that should be done in both the present and future. On the other hand, it is necessary to embrace the changes that the future may bring about in shaping a cultural identity. Communities are constructed not only through memory and narrative but also through new inputs, such as the consideration of environmental circumstances, interaction with other communities, and so forth.

Specific cultural identities may not be obvious at first sight. Whereas it may be possible to trace stages in the history of a particular cultural identity, this does not mean that these stages follow any logical or linear continuity. The main reason for this is that cultural identity is always being made and re-made. There are certainly some existing practices, relationships and core ideas and symbols prevailing in different cultures. There would be no chance of stating that one culture differs from another without them.

The concept of cultural identity involves the notion of collectivity. We should clarify now the roles of communities and individuals in this respect. Individuals are vital for the transformation and perpetuation of a community’s cultural identity. Yet, all in all, communities and their cultural identities are not just the sum of their individuals’ identities. On the contrary, the cultural identity of a community results from a slow process of individuals contributing through transformative behaviour and the achievement of general consensus. It should be noted that this consensus is not always something explicit or written in the form of a set of norms, but sometimes it is more of a tacit assumption learned through the experience of living in a specific community.

The concept of the other can help us clarify these considerations. This is in the sense that the idea of cultural identity involves an amount of finding a sense of self- identification, which the notion of other can provide. One form is the other that individuals experience from the rest of individuals belonging to the same community. Communities show a degree of diversity in the specific constitution of personal individualities, without this undermining the idea of a broad, shared cultural identity. In turn, particular individualities help preserve some features of the community’s cultural identity and transform others.

A second form of other is recognised by people in the practices involved in their cultural identity as opposed to practices instantiated by the cultural identities of other communities. A community differentiates itself from other communities, allowing a conception of cultural identity that accommodates both a degree of diversity and shared peculiarities among its members. Let me refer to Hegel’s (1997 [1807]) ideas in order to

16 clarify this point. According to Hegel, there is a dialectic relationship between the Self and the other that can be explained as follows: the Self requires the existence of the other as the counterpart that grants Self-definition. This interaction between the Self and the other leads to the ideas of self-consciousness and self-awareness. Accordingly, as long as there is an other (in this case, a different cultural identity from the one I belong) there can be a self-realisation that a Self exists (or in this context, that I can tell if I belong to a specifically cultural identity).

With respect to the elements that have incidence in the development of the cultural identity of a community, there is a range of different examples such as basic norms of coexistence or similar shared ideals that come to play in its establishment. Herder pointed out this issue in the 18th century. I refer to his view on the philosophy of human history, which involves the consideration of different geographical areas and the adaptation of human communities to them.6

Herder looks into the development of the history of human beings. He resorts to the idea that humans and their environment are in an intimate connection, which is a factor that influences human behaviour and humans’ worldviews. Even though Herder proceeds to do a further analysis of the history of humankind, I will just consider his initial ideas regarding the relationship between people and their surrounding environment.

The claim that weather has an influence on the shaping of a cultural identity may appear at first sight difficult to defend. However, there have been studies regarding how certain environmental factors can influence humans’ lives. In 2002, The Baker Research Institute of Melbourne examined the influence of factors like sunlight, temperature, rain frequency and atmospheric pressure on people’s moods. In order to do this, they took serotonin samples, which is the hormone that regulates mood. The results showed that people living in places with less sunlight, or during the winter season, were secreting less serotonin that people with more sunlight.

The references to the Baker Research Institute study and Herder’s ideas show that considering geo-climate factors within the scope of discussions in environmental ethics is not something that is too out of place. Although there is a long way to go from weather affecting mood to the claims about culture, it is a statement that sets the grounds to the

6 In the following paragraphs I draw from Waissbluth (2012). I pursued a similar argument in that work.

17 possibility of giving serious consideration to weather and location having a more important role in discussions regarding human behaviour in relation to the environment.

It is important to understand that claiming that geo-climate factors have an influence does not imply that this influence upon humans is passive. On the contrary, the influence works in both directions: communities are influenced by geo-climate factors and in turn, people modify their surroundings, which has an impact on weather, flora, fauna and landscape overall. In other words, the influence between each works in a dialectic manner.

When speaking of communities, Herder used the term Volkgeist, i.e., the spirit of the folk, which represents the shared features of a nation. This claim stands closely with culture-based ideas. Importantly, for Herder it also meant that these shared features can be connected with the particularities of each climate and geographical location. Communities are historical in such a way that we can view humans as organisms that are part of the whole ecosystem (Herder, 1784 -1791, p.19).

Herder claims that both the micro-cosmos and macro-cosmos are in concordance. The idea of a micro-cosmos would represent, in this case, the life of human beings; whereas the macro-cosmos would represent the surrounding environment. The concordance between them means that a particular human being is always connected with nature, thus being dependent on their surroundings. Furthermore, Herder argues that when people stop looking at themselves as particular individuals and regard themselves as belonging to a whole – i.e., as belonging to a community embedded in a specific environment – they realise that there is a unique identity that encompasses several individuals.

These ideas, along with the assumption that humans are social creatures that seek to live among a community, helps to understand how humans are not only influenced by geo-climate factors individually, but at a community level. Again, this claim does not purport to imply that communities are only being influenced by these factors, since there are other elements that play a role in this. Neither does this mean that communities are passively influenced, as was explained a few paragraphs above.

Since there are different geo-climate factors for different communities, Herder takes on a more localised account. According to Herder, the importance of examining particular communities does not mean to imply that a certain place is better than another. Instead, examining places in their locality has the purpose of showing that a particular

18 place is significant to someone given that it encompasses the people and the places that individuals care about. That is, individuals make places their own places. In turn, these people and places make this relationship meaningful through the appreciation of the efforts incurred in dwelling in a specific area with particular geographical and weather conditions (Herder, 1784 - 1791, p. 27). Hence, this view highlights the idea of a cultural identity that is shaped by external influences like geo-climate factors. Given that climate and geographical conditions affect people’s behaviour, customs and habits, it can be argued that these changes have an influence on the way a community perceives itself and attributes ethical values to the different components of their surroundings and their interactions with it. Surely, this is compatible with the fact that in a community there are always individuals with their own particular opinions, thoughts and feelings about the place they inhabit; the main point at stake, nevertheless, is that the cultural identity of a community results from a generalised perception of what it is like to dwell in that particular place and how a communal feeling is created in such a place.

In summary, geo-climate influence is one factor that comes to play when a cultural identity is being developed, and if to this phenomenon is added the idea of how particular communities identify themselves, there is something interesting to explore from a philosophical perspective. Additionally, as it will be seen throughout this work, there is a dialectic relationship between these two concepts, since the influence does not only apply from geo-climate factors to cultural identity: communities with their particular cultural identities shape and transform their environment in order to live in it. The idea of including other notions like attachment or ethnogeography throughout this work is to show that these could help communities do this transformation of their surroundings in a more sustainable manner.

Cultural identity and the geo-climate factor influence are both crucial ideas in this work that help understand how communities are connected to their surroundings. Furthermore, the following question immediately arises: If we consider the influence of geo-climate factors on a community’s cultural identity, how can humans dwell in a more balanced manner with our surroundings? By balanced, I mean more environmentally friendly and more psychologically and socially adequate. For this, I will look into the project called Bioregionalism, which I consider as an example that helps clarifying the following point: If human communities are under the influence of geo-climate conditions, as Herder claims, then Bioregionalism can at the very least be a preliminary example of how the knowledge of this influence can be relevant for environmental awareness and also for our philosophical understanding of cultural identity and its ethical purport.

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3. An Outline of Bioregionalism7

3.1. Reading Bioregionalism from the Perspective of Environmental Ethics

In the following chapter I will look into the bioregional project as a mean to exemplify how can the dialectic relationship between geo-climate factors and community’s cultural identity be of use in an applied manner. This will help understand the scope a local reading on holistic environmentalism can have in aiming for a more sustainable dwelling.

Van Newkirk first coined the term bioregionalism in 1975.8 After that, authors like Kirkpatrick Sale have employed this expression in order to elaborate and defend similar views. Overall, bioregionalism is an ecophilosophical position that encompasses areas as diverse as politics, cultural studies and ecology. The core tenet of bioregionalism is that human activity should ideally be restricted to living in a distinctive ecological and geographical region. Such regions are called bioregions or life-places. Among the physical and environmental features that define a bioregion we find, for instance, watershed boundaries, the savannah, and the climatic zone and soil characteristics. Likewise, a bioregion is also determined by cultural phenomena, such as local cultural inbreeding, local knowledge for finding out solutions to local issues, and so forth.

The article “Environmental Ethics” available from the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy defines bioregionalism as follows:

“This is the view that natural features should provide the defining conditions for places of community, and that secure and satisfying local lives are led by those who know a place, have learned its lore and who adapt their lifestyle to its affordances by developing its potential within ecological limits. Such a life, the bioregionalists argue, will enable people to enjoy the fruits of self- liberation and self-development.” (Brennan and Lo 2011, section 3.4)

7 Throughout this chapter I will use also the expression life-place as a synonym of bioregion. 8 See McGinnis (1999, p. 22).

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From the perspective of environmental ethics, bioregionalism can thus be understood as the ecophilosophical view that seeks to put in practice a holistic conception of our relationship with the place in which we live.

However, how do we understand ecophilosophy? Let me draw on Kovel’s definition of this sub-discipline:

“An ‘ecophilosophy’ represents a comprehensive orientation that combines the understanding of our relation to nature, the dynamics of the ecological crisis, and the guidelines for rebuilding society in an ecocentric direction.” (Kovel, 2007, p. 187)

In view of this definition, bioregionalism appears beneficial in various ways, so long as it argues that it is necessary to look at local rather than global approaches. Bioregionalism attempts to find a suitably realistic method to tackle major environmental problems. As to the latter, a local way of addressing the challenges that bioregions face promises to be more beneficial than global strategies, as is argued below.

In his defence of bioregionalism, Thayer (2003) acknowledges that the word ecoregion, as proposed by the U.S. geographer Robert G. Bailey (see Thayer, 2003), may be technically more accurate than that of bioregion, given that the former recognises the role of other environmental influences such as climate and geography. However, Thayer still prefers to employ the term bioregion or life-place, and his choice is motivated by the fact that he not only aims to highlight the biotic aspect but also the interaction between culture and natural regions at a local scale.

Although Thayer is considered throughout the literature as the one who propelled the topic of bioregions, it was Sale (1996) who addressed the possibility of elaborating a bioregionalist project. Sale focuses on the importance of knowing the place we inhabit in view of becoming what he calls dwellers in the land. This broadly means the condition of being in closer connection with the surrounding environment. This invites us to recover some of the wisdom and the sense of inhabiting that we find in native communities and encourages us to develop them further in modern times – although none of this entails that we should attempt to live just like our ancestors did.

To recover certain ideas from native communities does not amount to re-enacting everything. Instead, it only aims at figuring out whether different views of the world can

22 still be useful. For instance, within the knowledge of indigenous cultures we may find useful practices, such as herbal medicine or observations about how to identify suitable grounds for building. Such knowledge comes from the relationship they had with their environment. This broadly illustrates that indigenous communities were largely shaped by, and adapted to, their specific geographic areas. Hence, looking at this through the lens of bioregionalism, expertise, whether intellectual or fundamentally experiential, needs to be taken into account when it comes to the examination of bioregions.

There are different ways of defining a bioregion. Sale (1996, p. 475), states that a particular bioregion is a specific region definable by natural rather than political boundaries. A bioregion runs with flexibility and fluidity, as does nature, and with the ability to support the life of human and non-human communities. Furthermore, in the bioregional picture, territorial borderlines are not strictly defined, but sensed and felt by the inhabitants of a specific community. This, along with some additional ecological knowledge, can facilitate the task of identifying a bioregion.

We find the following three delimitations of a bioregion, namely: ecoregion, georegion and morphoregion. Ecoregion is the widest, most encompassing of the three. It refers to the broadest distribution of native vegetation and soil types. Yet, ecoregion is also the most imprecise of the three and many bioregionalists now agree that a distinction between several bioregions can be made through a biotic shift. Here, the problem for bioregionalists is to determine the precise percentage-change of both flora and fauna that demarcates one bioregion from another. Such a change, if it takes place, tends to be gradual, and hence it makes difficult to individuate bioregions with precision. It should be kept in mind, however, that the imprecision regarding the delimitation of borderlines of bioregions is acknowledged without in principle being considered a problem. On the contrary, this imprecision supports the idea of borderlines perceived in a more fluid and natural manner.

The second delimitation is the concept of georegion. These are to be found within large ecoregions. In particular, a georegion is a smaller kind of bioregion shaped by physiographic features, such as river basins, valleys and mountain ranges, and most of the time with particular plant/animal traits. That is, a watershed, for instance, may be a distinctive kind of georegion, where people normally settle down nearby and pursue a lifestyle that accommodates the conditions of the land.

Finally, some places represent a further subdivision within georegions, which are called morphoregions. Smaller territories with identifiable natural landforms and

23 distinctive life-forms characterise this subdivision. Towns are examples of this. To use an example similar to the watershed above, a morphoregion would be located at a section of the watershed, where the conditions change as the river flows from its headwaters to its mouth.

These divisions are not intended to be precise but they give us a guideline of the elements that make up a bioregion. They are not, in this sense, normative descriptions of bioregions and need not be fulfilled as criteria for bioregions in every scenario. In contrast, the task of determining appropriate bioregional delimitations has to be carried out by the inhabitants of a particular area in each case. In this respect, Sale (1996, p. 478) explains that this way of decision-making is safer and more sensible towards the environment than a normative prescription. The reason behind this is that bioregionalism takes seriously what is rooted in the history of the community as it is shown in its elderly members, especially since in some communities it may be the case that the latter are the ones who transmit the knowledge and understanding (i.e., the lore) of how to work out and survive in a specific environment. The point worth making, in this respect, is that it would not, in principle, be a problem that the delimitation of a bioregion were left in the hands of the inhabitants themselves if they adopt the final aim and conditions of bioregionalism.

Thayer (2003) outlines five components that comprise bioregions: physiographic, biotic, cultural, spiritual and artistic. The physiographic dimension looks into bioregions as physical spaces, which are geographically legitimate and identifiable as an operative, spatial unit (Thayer, 2003, p. 15). The biotic aspect defines bioregions in terms of the inhabitant communities, both human and non-human, which dwell in certain regions and apparently give indications of particular ecological adaptations (Thayer, 2003, p. 33). There is yet the cultural element, which takes human culture, in particular, to be the best- suited aspect when it comes to defining regions and the size of communities (Thayer, 2003, p. 59). As to the spiritual feature, it does not necessarily refer to religious traditions; rather, it deals with the sense of belonging and attachment to a certain region, which usually results from the immersion in a particular bioregional culture (Thayer, 2003, p. 71). Finally, concerning the artistic dimension, it emphasises the idea of local art, which helps to support the bioregional culture (Thayer, 2003, p. 94).

The biotic perspective is the core ground from which other specific views on bioregionalism arise. Its main proposal can be stated thus: we all live in a place that is not only ours, but shared with several members of both human and non-human species. Overall, the biotic perspective claims that a sound conception of bioregions should focus

24 on pursuing the best way to live our lives9 and let others live theirs within the shared region. Furthermore, contrary to the physiographic view, which only takes into consideration geographical factors, the biotic stance encompasses a wide variety of elements that make up the environment in which we live. Yet, there is no suggestion as to how humans should sort out their relationship with the big biotic and abiotic ecosystems with which they interact. As I understand this, the definition of the cultural perspective introduces the relevance of humankind as a decisive factor, which tends to border on a strong form of anthropocentricism. Although the cultural aspect may be highly relevant to promote an understanding of the links between humans and their environment, this, I think, should be done in a sensible manner, as some indigenous views illustrate. I will exemplify this point in section 3.2 below.

Bioregionalism should be conceived of as an approach that puts forward an alternative view to understanding places only in geographical terms. In particular, it acknowledges the limitations and potential of the immediate place where people inhabit in socially inclusive, ecologically regenerative and spiritual ways. In this respect, the inclusion of a spiritual aspect in a bioregion leads us to understand bioregionalism as the concept that allows the incorporation of environmental concerns together with traditional wisdom. It makes progress in advancing some shared concepts which are suitable for making decisions as to the land. Moreover, it considerably enriches knowledge and awareness, insofar as it makes explicit the importance of the relationship between humans and land in a meaningful manner.

From a bioregionalist perspective, the link between land and human life is vital. The actual physical ground is what connects us to the nature of a bioregion as a whole. This provides us with a context. Accordingly, the recognition of a bioregion is the acceptance of the need to reassemble the world in an integrative manner. Following this line of argument, Kemmis (see Thayer, 2003, p. 65) has recently advocated the idea that the role of a place is relevant when it comes to political and cultural issues in a democratic community. As Kemmis claims (ibid.), civic participation needs a tangible object that comprises people, viz., a shared place that gathers members of a community.

As a result, there is the question of how a bioregion should be characterised, granted that it is mainly determined as a collective human endeavour (Thayer, 2003). It is important to clarify that bioregionalism is still a project and there is certainly room for

9 With the best way to live our lives I mean how to live more sustainably and more in accordance with an environmentally friendly mindset.

25 further development. As such, bioregionalism encourages the pursuit of the following ideas (see Thayer 2003, p. 67):

• Bioregions should be determined by the nature of specific regions: one should identify oneself with such place and grow attached to it. • Bioregions must safeguard both human and non-human species, organisms, and so forth. • Bioregions should encompass tangible objects as both being shared and of social value – this applies to the consideration of watersheds, habitats, species, and the like. • Bioregions allow direct communication in real time and space. • Bioregions must be created on the basis of mutual trust. • Bioregions are dependent on local wisdom and knowledge as the vital ingredients of a community. • Bioregions should find their rationale in common sense, creativity, ethics, intuition, memory and reason. • Bioregions empower all potential ‘stakeholders’ equally. • Bioregions should be impartial and socially just by means of symmetrical power arrangements. • Bioregions should be able to create social capital and to build capacity for problem- solving. • Bioregions are to be innovative when it comes to establishing institutional cooperation and horizontal networks. • Bioregions should invest in the future. • Bioregions should support communities of both place and interest. • Bioregions should guarantee good quality of life. • Bioregions must be regenerative. • Bioregions are expected to be respectful of natural boundaries that often extend across political demarcations. • Bioregions should be capable of growing over time.10 • Bioregions need to be adaptable to both internal and external change.

10 “Growing” here does not mean to expand, but rather to “flourish.”

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The purpose of the list being so extensive is to try and cover any possible issues that might stem if the bioregional project is applied. It is worth noting that there is no place that can exactly and entirely meet this list of features. Overall, these characteristics are only meant to serve as a guideline that a bioregionalist project should keep in mind in order to bring the theory down to an actual application.

3.2. People and Locality: A First Reference to the Yaganes Community

According to bioregionalism – and surely according to many ethical projects that seek to promote a sound environmental dwelling – the relevance of communities should not be overlooked. Among the ideas regarding communities, there is one that states that communities, whether human or not, are essentially groups of individuals that survive through self-sufficiency and adaptation to the surrounding conditions (Sale 1996, p. 476). Sale clarified this in an example he put forward regarding the ten-year, cross-cultural survey of the anthropologist Murdoch, who aims at reporting that communities are an intrinsic part of human life. “The institution of the community occurs ‘in every known human society’”, claims Sale (1996, p. 479). Therefore, it seems that for the bioregional project, communities, their culture and their respective wisdom are all core elements to be taken into consideration when pursuing bioregional practices. It comes as no surprise that people who live in a particular place come to develop a specific knowledge of their region. As to the practical dimension, it seems that people in such a situation tend to care about their place more sincerely than people who do not experience the feeling of belonging to it. In this regard, the benefits of an environmental ethical view that promotes a way of life in which communities take better care of their environment goes without mentioning.

Although the existence of communities is dominated by both socio-political demarcations and the strong influence of globalisation, among other things, advocates of bioregionalism observe that people are still prone to describe the place they inhabit in rather natural terms. This is another example that shows how underestimated is our relationship with the land. Moreover, it demonstrates the importance of such relationship in the development of a suitable way of understanding our bioregion.

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As mentioned before, indigenous people have a view of the world that shares some similarities with what bioregionalism aims for. In this regard, it can be claimed that bioregionalism is not a new proposal after all. In contrast, it can be interpreted as a modern turn of some conceptions of the way of living found in indigenous communities. Even though bioregionalist considerations came about from the contemporary discussion in environmental ethics, some indigenous communities have already put in practice an interaction with their environment, relying on a close relationship with the land they inhabit.

Let us look at one example of the lessons that bioregionalism draws from indigenous communities, viz., the Yaganes11, a community that goes back to the aboriginal people who inhabited a region in the Chilean southern-most Patagonia.12 As a first remark, Yaganes developed their whole lifestyle, language and architecture in a close relationship with the features of and the conditions imposed by their environment. It is worth mentioning that in the areas where the Yaganes lived, especially on Navarino Island, the average temperature in the warmest month is 9.6°C, and the lowest temperature reaches 1.9°C. Winds, on the other hand, can reach up to 140 km/h in relatively urbanised areas, whereas measurements of wind velocity in rural areas vary radically given the predominance of flat pampas.13 In view of this, the Yaganes community adopted practices that facilitated the interaction with their environment and, in the end, survival. Furthermore, it can be contended that they largely adapted successfully since evidence in historical registers demonstrates their ability to survive and reproduce. The Yaganes’ cultural heritage shows a special rapport with nature to which I will briefly refer later on in Chapter 5.

I should observe that I am aware of a series of problems that an indigenous analogy involves. The example of the Yaganes community is not meant to support the claim that indigenous people instantiate a perfect system of interaction between humans and their environment. By contrast, some indigenous communities have, perhaps unintentionally, threatened other species. One example to consider is the early Maori culture, which drove a great variety of bird species into extinction.14 Yet, leaving for the time being, such cases apart, the main reason for bringing up the idea of indigenous views

11 I thank one of the examiners for pointing out new avenues for research concerning the study of Yaganes’ culture. I intend to pursue such investigation in the future. At present, my hope is that the information provided suffices for making the philosophical point at stake. 12 I briefly mention here the Yaganes community but I will return to this point in Chapter 5. 13 See http://www.ecolyma.cl/documentos/bioclimatografia_de_chile.pdf 14 See http://www.terranature.org/extinctBirds.htm for more information.

28 of the environment is as follows: they invite us to reconsider some of their experiences that can be useful for carrying out a bioregional project.

In short, the bioregionalist appeal to indigenous studies faces a series of difficulties. For one thing, it would be unrealistic, if not plainly absurd, to endorse the view that communities have to follow the indigenous path in our modern times. It would not make much sense to claim that bioregions and the lifestyles they promote have to be regulated by the distribution of trout colonies, and the like. Harmony between humans and other creatures is what bioregionalism encourages; however, in order to do so it has to proceed in an integrative manner, considering cultural, political, social and economic features, which vary from one bioregion to another, and from one community to another.

3.3. How to Plan a Bioregion

In order to assess the viability of the philosophical implications of a bioregional project being applied, it is necessary to understand how bioregions work. To do so, requires inquiring into other fields of study such as geography and ethnography.

One of the aspects worth looking into is how bioregions are planned. The first step is to figure how a bioregion needs to be delimited by some kind of spatial demarcation. This is mainly because there are a variety of bioregions, and each one should respond to their unique nature and culture for the sake of their best interests. Along these lines, it may seem that there should be as many different approaches to bioregionalism as there are different life-places.

Likewise, the planning of a bioregion should consider time in order to foster awareness and knowledge of how the land works and changes through different seasons of the year. For example, if a community decides to create a bioregion in the state of Victoria, Australia, a long-term study of the fluctuations of temperature, rainfall, wind, soil quality, among other geo-climate factors, should be undertaken in order to make decisions about the delimitation of the bioregion and the good use of local and seasonal resources. This should be done, of course, in considering the culture and history of such place.

Considering practical matters, one of the steps towards turning this project into a reality is to locate and recognise the capacities and resources that a particular region offers. Even though this might sound as if it would only apply to rural dwellers, this view

29 might also work for urban dwellers in the sense of “learning the details of the trade and resource dependency between city and country and the population limits appropriate to the region’s carrying capacity” (Sale, 1996, p. 473).

With the recognition of the capacities of a region, self-reliance at a collective level is a necessary and inherent element in bioregional projects. Note that transporting goods and services at the fast pace that is required nowadays results in a waste of energy and resources, which in turn can contribute creating dependent regions15. The other side of this problem is the exportation and exploitation of the region’s natural resources, which in some cases is favoured, discarding the possibility of using these resources for the purpose of improving the region itself. Concerning this, bioregionalism aims at reversing this situation, recommending the notion of self-reliance on the region’s particular goods.

Both Thayer and Sale agree that a bioregion should work according to the criteria of sustainability and self-sufficiency. According to these criteria, cities and their surroundings should look at the possibility of replacing their imports with their own raw materials, goods and services. In other words, in a bioregional system, economy needs to focus firstly on maintaining rather than exporting its goods, adapting and conserving natural resources, thus promoting a better interaction with the surrounding natural environment. Consequently, people in a bioregional economy should establish a system of production and exchange rather than encourage a system that grows towards constant consumption. The use of local resources is to be promoted, whereas trade should be restricted to their surpluses. All of these measures aim at two things: a greater environmental consciousness of the available resources and preventing some bioregions to control others through monopolising a resource. It is important to remember that the relevance of self-sufficiency in the conception of an ideal place is not a new idea. In Politics, Book I, Aristotle talks about self-sufficiency in terms of autárkeia as one of the features that makes a community perfect, or more specifically, a perfect polis.16

Some issues emerge regarding how this self-reliance is portrayed by bioregionalism. To clarify this, there may be some bioregions that might need imports to survive, as it would be the case of Punta Arenas, a city in the southern-most Patagonia in Chile. As to this specific case, note that due to its climate and soil conditions, Punta Arenas

15 For more information on the relationship between transportation and energy consumption: https://people.hofstra.edu/geotrans/eng/ch8en/conc8en/ch8c2en.html 16 Aristótles, Política, Libro I, 1252a1 – 1252b9

30 cannot produce, among other things, citrus fruit17 Given that such fruits are recommended in human diet so as to avoid scurvy,18 this case makes bioregionalism look flawed. However, a bioregionalist view on economy would suggest a solution for this kind of conundrum that I will analyse in Chapter 4.

According to bioregionalism, the use and handling of goods is to rely on local producers rather than global ones. Markets and a widespread use of greenhouses would be employed to deliver seasonal foods. Regarding industry, local artisans would provide products made out of natural material and use non-polluting processes. These products would need to be of high quality so as to reduce waste and pollution; in turn, they would contribute to improving public health. As a consequence of a system like this, there would be some changes in how the economy would be carried out. Economic issues like inflation or unstable currency might be improved, since bioregionalism would aim to reduce expenditures on outside products and the income would be made through local resources (Sale, 1996, p. 481). Energy sources and transportation in a bioregional project would be under the same conditions as any other kind of resource. This means that self-sufficiency and non-polluting processes need to be considered. For instance, some bioregions may depend on solar power, which of course is related to specific geo-climate conditions (Sale, 1996, p. 480). When it comes to transportation, other bioregions can depend on alternative kinds of energy like human-powered machines, electric vehicles and trains, walking and biking, and so forth.

Thus far, the argument shows that self-sufficiency is a key element for bioregions (Sale 1996; Thayer, 2003). This means that bioregions need to adapt to their particular circumstances. Ideally, bioregions should be able to develop their own energy based on available resources, to grow enough food according to the climate and soil conditions, and to favour the use and production of goods and products from local crafters, artisans and industry. Nevertheless, self-sufficiency should not be misunderstood as a step towards isolation from other bioregions in both communication and trade. These connections with other communities can be undertaken within strict conditions, such as being non- dependent, non-monetary and non-injurious.

Along with self-sufficiency, there is another concept that a bioregion needs to fulfil: the principle of cooperation. An exchange of knowledge, techniques and innovations in

17 This is mainly because Punta Arenas has a subpolar oceanic climate that does not allow proper growing conditions for most kinds of citrus fruits. Data for this was collected from: http://164.77.222.61/climatologia/publicaciones/Estadistica_ClimatologicaIII.pdf 18 For more information about scurvy: http://emedicine.medscape.com/article/125350-overview

31 such disciplines as science, culture and politics are especially required in a self-sufficient bioregion. In view of this, creating rigid barriers would be the wrong way to go. A bioregion needs to preserve itself, and in order to do so it is important to be open to the influence of other communities and ideas. In this regard, Sale (1996, p. 483) claims: “The successful ecosystem requires its many parts to operate smoothly together, regularised and interdependent over time”. Accordingly, cooperation is what triggers a proper functioning of all the other characteristics of a bioregion. Cooperation is vital for any community that seeks to make better use of the available resources.

Another important feature of the development of a bioregion is that the knowledge of what best suits each life-place should not only consider the experts’ advice but also the experience of the inhabitants. Sometimes, the best solutions for the development of a life- place can be found in collaboration between both the technological knowledge of expertise and traditional wisdom. This point has been made in the following terms:

“[A] city region develops best when it preserves and enhances the abilities of local citizens to respond to economic opportunities, replaces imports to the greatest extent possible, adjusts its extractive industrial base to one that can be sustained over the long term without despoliation, and seeks the highest quality for its natural resources, ecosystems, and quality-of-life amenities” (Thayer, 2003, p. 119).

Contemporary discussions in philosophical ethics have emphasised as a growing concern the fact that humans need to know how to inhabit in a way that is more attuned to their surroundings. This is why localisation movements and their thinking regarding bioregions are a subject matter of lively discussion. The essential change of how to conceive our life-place and the interaction with it should arise from, on the one hand, the realisation that we all live here and now together in this place, so to speak; whereas on the other hand, from the challenge of promoting and facilitating the wellbeing of future generations. Once we acknowledge this, there is a mutual dependency between the place and us. Planning bioregions would then be a step towards the idea that a life-place is an instantiation of a holistic view of humans and their environment, encompassing a site for biodiversity, a group of sustainable communities, a region that produces goods and services, and overall a cultural region individuated according to some shared similarities.

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Naturally, the planning of a life-place is not to be addressed as a task for precise scientific know-how. No universally accepted set of rules and procedures is available to be followed. By contrast, the planning itself is to be open to discussions in order to benefit from the input of different sources. From a philosophical perspective, bioregionalism is still an evolving trend that needs further elaboration and a detailed defence so as to gain wider acceptance. It needs, for instance, a change in the way we educate children, targeting issues of integration and making explicit that it affects the life of people as a whole in important respects. The following passage sheds light on this point:

“When one deeply explores a local place, one finds strong connections between personal inhabitation and the larger patterns of existence; the local life-place becomes a bright illustration not only of the uniqueness of a region but of the universality of existing as a human being on a living earth.” (Thayer, 2003, pp. 253 – 254)

In summary, a bioregional project seems to be holistic. Bioregionalism highlights the importance of each element in an ecosystem and tries to put our co-dependency as a focus in order to create a more sustainable life. This seems quite adequate for the goal of finding a way to dwell in a more sustainable manner that is both, local in its proceeding and also has a holistic grasp on how to relate to each element of the environment.

However, a bioregionalist project still brings up many concerns that should not be overlooked. In the following chapter I will concentrate in the main issues and critiques of bioregionalism. This will be in order to elaborate a version of the project that can better help understand the actual extent that a local holistic environmentalism might have.

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4. On the Critical Reception of Bioregionalism: a Sketch of a Moderate Version

4.1. Concerns Regarding Bioregionalism

In this section, I examine a range of criticisms of the bioregionalist position advanced by Brennan (1998) and Kovel (2007). They unfold a variety of arguments against bioregionalism. Among these, Brennan criticises a radical version of this view called homely bioregionalism. This highlights the problematic position of this view given the thin line that separates it from a totalitarian system. There is, for instance, the issue that it gives a romanticised conception of home. In another respect, Kovel purports to show the apparent impracticality of key ideas of the bioregionalist project. The notion of self- sufficiency and its implications regarding political and geographical boundaries, resources and transportation, are deemed to be obscure. After reviewing and examining these criticisms of the bioregionalist position, in this chapter I propose a moderate version of bioregionalism, which is more compatible with what I call local holistic environmentalism.

Bioregionalism appears at first glance to be an appealing doctrine, since it connects ideals of community and economics with the idea of going back to the basics. Here, the main concern is not merely about location but rather about the concrete ecological workings of a part of the Earth: “the flows of watersheds, the lay of the hills, the kinds of soils, the biota that inhabit a bioregion, all regarded as the organic substrate of a community built on human scale and dedicated to living gently on the earth and not over it” (Kovel, 2007, p. 191).

Concerning Brennan’s criticisms, they stem from the idea of homely bioregionalism. This homely bioregionalism is a version of what bioregionalism can become, which Brennan depicts as having “(…) totalitarian overtones and, even when interpreted as an empirical recommendation, incorporates an optimistic and romanticised conception of 'home'” (Brennan 1998, p. 215). In particular, homely bioregionalism is meant to tackle the bioregional denial, which is the collective feeling of preferring external standards of ethical practice and beauty over the community’s own, given its flora and fauna. The main effect of the so-called bioregional denial is that there is always a constant pressure of attempting to emulate physically and artificially ideal places to inhabit, which are supposed to meet the globalised standards of both ethical practice and beauty.

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As an example of this phenomenon, Brennan mentions the case of Perth in Western Australia. In his view, Perth seeks to imitate places like California. In particular, Perth’s government has imported foreign flora, mainly palm trees. They have also named streets with names of attractive places such as Secret Harbour, Meadow Springs, and Windsor Hills, all of them referring to places that are generally considered more attractive than the environment that Perth provides. Nevertheless, opposed to this trend, there are people like the hill dwellers in Perth, who have not succumbed to this bioregional denial. By contrast, they persist in living a life that actively reaffirms some aspects of bioregionalism.

It is worth noting that both ways of living in this example are considered “places”, in Proust’s sense (Brennan 1998, pp. 218–219) – viz., a life bound up with places through time, memory and experiences. Nonetheless, something differentiates both ways of living, since hill dwellers seem to belong to land in a stronger sense than people in the city. In spite of this, Brennan claims that even in the case of bioregional denial, homely bioregionalism does not correctly address this phenomenon. In fact, as I examine below drawing on Brennan’s ideas, to do so may result in even worse situations.

What bioregionalism suggests in view of living in an ethically acceptable way, which is conducive to happiness and wellbeing, is a closer identification with the environment. Studying the surrounding nature, understanding it and caring for it, would be the best way to reach self-fulfilment. This being opposed to a massified view of society, as in the case mentioned above, shows another goal of bioregionalism: to decentralise the government. However, even supposing that there is a potential of self-development in a bioregional way for specific, decentralised regions, this does not explain why a bioregion should be taken as the main ground of a political community.

Moreover, we can still call into question the overall relevance of the bioregionalist view, given that it can still be argued that people can have a feeling of responsibility towards the environment without adopting a bioregionalist stance.19 Here is a passage that I take from Brennan:

“Why should the boundaries of bioregions, their beginnings and endings, be of any consequence to morals, politics, aesthetics or even to environmentalists?

19 It is worth mentioning, however, that this is not the only reason for advocating bioregionalism. This is just to mention one of the critiques that Brennan points out.

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(…) We can still care for the land if our community straddles two, or twenty- two bioregions.” (Brennan, 1998, p. 227)

Pursuing this line of argument, we observe that the main issues of homely bioregionalism can be categorised into three general dimensions: social, political and belonging. The social criticism regards how some tightly knit communities, which are closer to the notion of bioregions, can be places that favour intolerance, stifling originality and leading to abuse, prejudice and victimising or destroying the weak. In other words, in order to have strongly cohesive communities, it appears that a price of the diminution of individuality and self-assertiveness must be paid.

As to the second concern, Brennan puts forward a strong criticism regarding the potential of homely bioregional in political matters, given the potential negative effects that such a hypothetical community appears destined to face. If in principle these bioregions could successfully exist, it is unlikely that they could provide a liberal polity for free people. One of the reasons behind this is that bioregionalism and its reading through homely bioregionalism require communities to be self-sufficient and to have what seems to be an excessive sense of identification with the place they inhabit. This combination of autarkic living and identification can be extended to the relationship between people and the particular state that governs them. As Brennan (1998, p. 230) maintains, “what damages the state damages each of us”. Bearing this in mind, it seems easy for a totalitarian regime to arise if bioregionalism is granted: “If the bioregion is the fons et origo of the polity, then bioregional identification will translate pretty quickly into political identification” (Brennan, 1998, p. 230). Let it suffice to emphasise that an excessive absorption in the community’s practices and goals can become one form or other of regional nationalism, which subsumes people in the naïve way of thought that they just dwell in their regions, while ignoring a wider universe of other places and other people.

There is a third criticism that has to do with the question of belonging, which Brennan firstly relates to the notion of memory and experience. Here is the outline of this counterargument. In order to build a nationalist mindset, memory is an important factor, as Sorlin describes with the phenomenon of the colonization of the United States (see Brennan, 1998, p. 229). The problem in this case is that the first colonists that arrived in the United States would not have been able to create memories in that place, since they were just arriving. Hence, the place could not be understood as the idea of home within this sense of belonging. However, as Casey points out (ibid.), examples of this kind are

36 inaccurate. This is because the places with which pioneers deal do not constitute a home from the very beginning. Yet, there may be a chance to construct an identity – which is in its infancy, so to speak – thereby not being considered as places of possible historical belonging in the first place. Only aboriginals, as the primary inhabitants of the land, could be considered to be at home in what is at some point a hostile living place for colonists.

Secondly, Brennan also criticises the aspect of belonging in relationship with an extreme sense of identification with Nature:

“I identify with Nature to the extent that its interests are assumed by me (see the discussion of this in Plumwood 1993, Ch. 7). What damages Her damages me. This, of course, is plain silly. I want the trees in my garden to flourish, and I am disappointed if they do not.” (Brennan, 1998, p. 230)

Considering this, two general threats emerge: first, the intensified absorption of the individual in nature, which means that the individual abandons herself to the natural order; whereas, second, the adoption of nature by the self, converting the needs and desires of someone in particular into natures’ needs and desires. The main concern with the first issue is that it leads to dispossession, loss of subjectivity and identity; while the second describes an egomaniac assumption of unrestrictedly humanising our surroundings in order to understand it in our terms. Against this, when talk about belonging and identification, it appears necessary to have a certain degree of separation. To be able to separate oneself from something gives the chance to recognise both the object and self. Jessica Benjamin explains this in the following terms: “True independence means sustaining the essential tension of these contradictory impulses; that is, both asserting the self and recognising the other” (Brennan, 1998, pp. 230 – 231).

Allow me to move on now to the examination of Kovel’s critical appraisal of bioregionalism. The author firstly claims that trying to extend bioregionalism as an ecophilosophy is a challenge, since the idea behind bioregionalism is incapable of properly guiding social transformation and social practice. Kovel explains that there are fundamental problems with some ideas in bioregionalism, such as the notion of boundaries that Sale investigates. One of these problems is posed by the notion of area, which in boundary terms seems quite vague. Sale, in particular, does not provide a proper clarification of such a concept when he develops his ideas on bioregionalist boundaries, even though he seems to defend a rather ambiguous parameter for such an issue. In addition, Sale argues that it is reasonable to leave the decision about boundaries of an area

37 to the people that inhabit it, without giving any clue as for how to properly assess an actual reshape of a region without conflictive actions like expropriation.

Rethinking the boundaries between bioregions is not a small task. Previously (see section 3.3) I mentioned the case of what happens in a bioregional project if a region lacks certain vital resources to subsist. In a case like this, a strict bioregionalist will argue that these issues will be resolved with a morphoregion that includes enough areas with suitable resources to survive. Nonetheless, this will create another kind of problem, which is essentially cultural. Creating a morphoregion merely in terms of resources would be enough in some cases like uniting Argentinean and Chilean Patagonia, for example. However, this might not work, at least immediately, where countries hold strong pre- existing cultural conflicts. Furthermore, this is not a minor problem for a bioregionalist project, since important differences arise between diverse land regions that would offer some sustainability for productive development.

Another issue is that Sale uses an idyllic image of the life of North American aboriginals as an example of a community that lived off the land and could distribute themselves along the lines of what he recognises as bioregions. Nevertheless, as Kovel (2007) points out, North American aboriginals’ understanding of the world was established on the idea of holding land in common. This worldview collided with the colonisers’ capitalist view of land as property. History shows the conflict between the concepts of property versus communal sharing in other cases, such as the Yaganes aboriginals and the Spanish colonisers.20 Yet, here is another turn for the same concern: these days, it would be extremely difficult, if not plainly impossible, to redesign the land so as to create a bioregionalist project, assuming that land remains a commodity to be exploited by people, as per current capitalist standards. This imposes a great obstacle for the viability of a bioregionalist project.

With the goal of defending their views as an ecophilosophy, advocates of bioregionalism need to establish a system based on self-sufficiency. One of the things this means is that, to begin with, each bioregion needs to develop its own particular energy according to its specific type of ecology. Yet, the capacity of bioregions to create enough resources can be questioned, even considering that an ecological society would try to manage the enhancement of energy efficiency and reduce needs. Not all regions are able to produce enough clean energy to supply the increasing demands of the modern world.

20 In the case of the Yaganes and the sense of property, I will mention some aspects of this briefly in section 5.3.

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According to Kovel (2007), this way of tackling the issue of energy and resources is just a half-made solution that arises from a naturalised ideology rather than from a sound consideration of reality.

With respect to self-sufficiency, Sale does not appear to purposely imply the promotion of isolation among bioregions. In fact, he claims that bioregions should share knowledge with other bioregions as well as to share the necessary tools to help others become self-sufficient. However, the problem here lies in the restricted limits of connection and trading in a bioregionalist project – that is, connections must be non- dependent, non-monetary, and non-injurious. These are quite strict conditions and bioregionalism might be taking a step backwards instead of forwards. To be clear, let us divide and analyse the three conditions:

a) Non-dependent connections: A community controlling a resource that others might need can open the chance to an exacerbated dependency and, thus, the problem of taking advantage. Therefore, there should be connections between bioregions that do not fall into a strong dependency of each other. It is worth noting that for some places these connections are required for the sake of survival. The solution for this would call for the creation of a connection that does not leave anybody in a disadvantaged position. b) Non-monetary connections: This tries to tackle problems such as inflation or deflation of currency. Nevertheless, all the work and energy invested in something needs to be reattributed in some way. With a non-monetary connection, what remains is barter. Then there is the issue of the rightful way of determining how many strawberries I can exchange for ceiling materials, and the like. c) Non-injurious connections: This is one of the most reasonable conditions of connections that bioregionalism tries to encourage. To seek connections between regions that try not to do damage, or at the very least that try to diminish the damage, is something that not only a bioregionalist project should advance but so should anyone who seeks a balanced relationship with the environment. Of course, there will always be an amount of damage done, but what bioregionalism aims with this kind of connection is to diminish damage as much as possible.

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Even though Sale seems to encourage a minimum of trades, these need to fulfil the three conditions stated above. The problem with these conditions is that there will be cases where some places lack an important amount of vital resources and need to recur to imports and exports on a greater scale than bioregionalism allows. For these cases, barter seems an option to cope with this situation; yet it is not an ideal solution, since the problem with barter is how to determine the value of things in order to make a proportional transaction.

From this it seems that a bioregionalist project could be in need of some flexibility in some of its ground points. This is the main reason that I want to pursue a moderate version that rescues the relevant ideas of a bioregionalist project and also considers the criticisms.

4.2. A Sketch of Moderate Bioregionalism

Not all stances on bioregionalism have such negative implications. Brennan, for one, acknowledges this and even points out the problems with bioregionalism seen through homely bioregionalism. In Brennan’s words:

“If they exist, natural bioregions should be protected, and so should their diversity. This, of course, is a harmless kind of bioregionalism – not one that commends establishing small, self-governing communities to tend such regions.” (Brennan, 1998, p. 236)

Considering this passage, and that bioregionalism is still a view currently under debate, it is still possible to derive some morals from the bioregionalist intuitions. Indeed, the theoretical purport of bioregionalism can deliver a series of insights when it comes to our views on environmental ethics. Bioregionalism is still, I claim, a very fertile concept. In the remainder of this section, I sketch a moderate reading of this approach.

One of the main problems of taking bioregionalism seriously is its ambition to become a view that carries political implications. If bioregionalists concentrate on safeguarding the benefits of a better connection between humans and their physical

40 surroundings, rather than attempting to construct a brand-new political system, with their own set of rules and norms, then bioregionalism may still be a fertile conception in the environmental ethics debate. In terms of its political agenda, bioregionalism seems to seek an overly strict self-sufficiency, which is closely collated through some of the conditions for economy named throughout Chapter 3. Nonetheless, there are regions in the world that are incapable of such a level of autarkic system, either because they cannot produce enough goods to survive or because they are not developed enough as to meet the high demands and standards of a bioregion. Instead, some bioregions would be open to accepting trade when necessary, if self-sufficiency were sought as a desideratum, not a condition for a place to be a bioregion.

Moderate bioregionalism can cope with social criticism since it can tackle some of the effects of a closed community. The way moderate bioregionalism is capable of doing this is, on the one hand, by being more flexible with the three kinds of connections: relationships with other bioregions would be easier to maintain and, hence, it would be easier to avoid problems such as places that are narrow-minded and extremely closed. On the other hand, moderate bioregionalism emphasises a strong connection with the land but not at an extreme level and without a political agenda that could make use of this strong connection as means to develop a totalitarian system.

It is important to conserve a certain level of communal engagement and activities that permit the bonds between community and families. This is because, on one hand, community engagement allows stability and permanency of such community and, while, on the other, a community sense allows communication, understanding and a more effective care of the environment in which people dwell.

Finally, the criticism of the notion of belonging, as described by Brennan in section 4.1 of this work, can be bypassed if we adopt moderate bioregionalism. The latter would rather conceive of the process of bonding, in which people experience their surroundings in a strong way, but not excessively as a standard view of bioregionalism seems to portray.

When someone feels the need to care for something, there must be a certain level of relationship to what is being taken care of. A strong connection with nature and the environment should not be rejected altogether. Rather, what is required is just a way of relating to nature and environment in a suitable way. This line of argument can certainly benefit from the examination of places that show a strong sense of identification with their land without converting themselves into so self-absorbed communities. These places are not actual bioregions but places that portray current cases of strong connection to the

41 land that could benefit from a moderate version of bioregionalism. Places like the Magallanes region in Chile and Catalunya in Spain are surely good examples. These two cases illustrate a common feature: the members of their communities show a strong sense of attachment and belonging to the place they inhabit. For example, in the Magallanes region there is a phenomenon called regionalism. This phenomenon explains that it is because of the physical remoteness and environmental constraints that the inhabitants of this region feel more attached to their region than to the rest of the country,21 even as to include in their discourse the fact that they are first “Magellans” and then “Chileans”. Lastly, in the case of Catlunya, they also have a political movement entitled the Catalan Independence Movement, which advocates for their independence from Spain. This movement derived from Catalan nationalism, which historically considers the rise of the Catalan territory around 11th century22 and has grown into a modern nationalism since 1886. 23 In fact, in recent years there have been protests that try to achieve their independence.24

After considering a moderate version of bioregionalism it can be said that there are still some flaws that require further study. Nonetheless, for the purpose of the main goal of this work, this version of bioregionalism should suffice.

In summary, a bioregionalist project joins the importance of the influence of geography and local resources with the role of community’s cultural identity in pursuing a sustainable dwelling.

21 For more information on this please see: http://web.archive.org/web/20070621210656/http://www.cyberhumanitatis.uchile.cl/CDA/text o_simple2/0,1255,SCID%253D3548%2526ISID%253D258,00.html 22 For more information on the history of Catalunya please see: http://www.esquerra.cat/documents/arxiu/declaracio.pdf and http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-20345071 23 On the origins and characteristics of Basque and Catalan nationalism please see: https://www.fairobserver.com/region/europe/basque-and-catalan-nationalism-evolution/ 24 For more information on this topic please see: http://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe- 19564640

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5. A Local Reading of Holistic Environmentalism

5.1. What is Holistic Environmentalism?

In this chapter I will look into a local reading of holistic environmentalism. This I will later call local holistic environmentalism and it will be the notion that encompasses the dialectic relationship between communities and their environment. In order to do so, I would be using the help of other two concepts, namely ethnogeography and attachment. Later in subsections of this chapter I will explain what I understand by those terms and what is the usefulness of these concepts for the local holistic environmentalism. In one hand, holistic environmentalism advances an approach that considers all the members of the environment as an intertwined whole. On the other, a local reading will give this view a more meaningful connection between humans and their environment and will address the question of how communities should dwell, considering local geo-climate factors and a local sense of belonging to a community. In particular, this view aims to promote a more sustainable way of life through the idea that humans and their environments are connected in various ways.

Leopold’s (2001) book A Sand County Almanac: with Essays on Conservation has been greatly influential on the topic of holistic environmental ethics. He considers land not merely as soil but as a source of energy in constant movement. This movement relies on the relationship among its dwellers. For instance, the land’s energy is taken upwards through the food chain and it is returned again through decay. Time and evolution can slowly change this flow of energy. An example of this natural movement is the life cycle of a glacier. A glacier naturally grows through the accumulation of snow in the high altitude mountains. This snow compacts itself through different layers and after that it melts and freezes again. Snow becomes firn25, and then it ices in a dense drift after various melting and refreezing cycles. This ice is under a high and constant amount of pressure and this – along with other physical forces such as gravity – breaks off big chunks of ice. This is all a natural phenomenon. Accordingly, the issue is not that the glaciers are breaking and melting away, they have done that for centuries; rather, it is how fast they are doing this over recent years.

25 This is a Swiss-German term use to define a type of snow that has been recrystallised. Please see: https://global.britannica.com/science/firn

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We can say that the flow of energy, as portrayed by Leopold, has been altered through destructive human behaviour. This shift can be considered negative, in the sense that it can endanger communities of different species and drive them to extinction. However, following the idea of the natural flow of energy and adaptation, some may claim that this shift would not necessarily be negative since the flow will still regain its course even if it is affected by human behaviour. Yet, in turn, according to Leopold, an action can be considered wrongful if it goes against “(…) the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community” (Leopold, 2010, p. 200). Hence, even if we consider a shift in the flow of energy as something that will keep its track with or without human intervention, it will still be considered a negative action by way of interfering with the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. Besides, interfering with the flow of energy will not necessarily ensure a proper habitat for the survival of certain species on Earth.

The wrongdoing in the shift of the flow of energy can be negative for all range of species. Thus, it can be said that what is bad for the environment, in general, can presumably be bad for humans in the long run as well. In this regard, Leopold examines the need of a “land ethic” in order to coordinate a suitable dwelling with all the communities in an ecosystem. He adopts the argumentative strategy of granting moral standing to the community’s land.

This argument of granting moral standing to the biotic community seems to lack some substantial aspects. It seems throughout the book that Leopold does not clarify the rationale for extending moral standing to the biotic place. It is necessary to note here that it seems easier to attribute moral standing to humans and non-human animals than to the plant kingdom, as Peter Singer has pointed out.26 The latter claim relies on the idea of suffering and how it is easier to detect this in human and non-human animals than the plant kingdom. However, according to Callicott,27 Leopold does not aim at endorsing moral standing unrestrictedly. As I understand this position, it involves two claims. First, humans care about nature since they can experience negative emotions towards the disappearance of an animal species or a landscape and, thus, presumably positive emotions towards the creatures living in an ecosystem and the ecosystem itself. Second, if humans express such an interest in the wellbeing of other communities, it is not implausible to extend moral

26 “Singer argues along rational grounds that the ‘expanding circle’ of moral worth should be re- drawn so that it includes non-human animals as well as human animals. (…) However, for Singer, it is a problematic issue whether or not such a moral boundary should also include plants and lesser life and non-life forms.” (Vardy, 1994, p. 215). 27 See http://www.iep.utm.edu/envi-eth/

44 standing to other communities. In this light, the land ethic appears to explicitly broaden our moral sentiments beyond self-interest and include the whole ecological community.

In spite of this, the appeal to sentiments does not appear to be reliable grounds for an argument, since there could always be people who do not experience such feelings towards the ecological community. In view of this, some authors have directly tackled the possibility of arguing for the moral standing of landscape and the plant kingdom in order to assess this concern. Johnson (1993), for one, addresses this issue maintaining that – like other communities – landscape and the plant kingdom may also have interests. According to this, interests are not always tied to conscious experience; they are rather like the phenomenon of a baby who breathes oxygen without being conscious of desiring it. So do other species as well, having an unconscious interest in fulfilling their nature.

So far, the connection between moral standing and having interests does not seem very clear. Yet, we can attempt to clarify this idea by taking landscape and the plant kingdom as moral patients. If things like land and plants are considered moral patients, the idea that they could have rights appears relatively plausible. The same happens in the case of a baby: at the stage under consideration, a baby is not conscious of what she wants or what she ought to do, but still has rights. For instance, her parents – or any caretaker – have a duty to her that needs to be respected. In a similar manner, landscape and the plant kingdom can be considered as bearing a sort of moral standing so long as they are moral patients. That is, if there is a certain duty we have regarding their wellbeing, it is not far- fetched to think that they can have at least certain rights to be conceived of as subjects of moral considerations.

In an extreme scenario, some might think that the idea of things like plants and soil having a moral standing is incompatible with living in a general sense, granted that the former is an important part of our nutrition and the latter is the actual physical place on which we stand. If the soil or plants have moral standing (just like human or non-human animals), human life would not be possible so long as it may inflict harm on the plant kingdom. Things like stepping on the soil would, in this scenario, be considered a wrongful action. Nonetheless, this is a mistaken conclusion considering the idea of rightness and wrongness that Leopold (see Leopold, 2010, p. 200) puts forward. The ideas of integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community do not specify a particular community; instead, all of them are considered as a whole. Hence, the fact that I eat lettuce may have lesser probability of affecting the integrity, stability and beauty of the whole biotic community.

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Thus, it might be the case that advocates of holistic environmentalism have the intention of creating a sense of moral obligation towards (or an attitude of caring for) all the components of the environment through granting moral standing to ecological communities as a whole. However, the full-blown accomplishment of this by these means may appear misleading, since morality is not something that non-human animals, the plant kingdom nor the landscape are demanding for themselves. This does not mean the same as denying that they are worthy of certain rights or to fulfil their nature. Here is the main point: humans have the power to make a difference that affects other members of an ecosystem – whether in a safe manner or endangering. Human impact has the potential to alter every other community on a large scale. Most importantly, we have this amount of power to accelerate certain changes in nature, which is something that other members of nature are not able to do by themselves. In spite of the problematic moral standing that this aspect imposes, there might be other possibilities to recover justification of moral obligation towards the plant kingdom and landscape. In order to do this, we may need to appeal to a different significance factor, such as human survival, the ability to enjoy nature or even to the sense of empathy towards other creatures.

Regarding moral obligations, some advocates of holistic environmental ethics condone the sacrifice of some creatures in specific circumstances, such as plagues.28 Nevertheless, they seem reluctant to apply the same reasoning universally, condoning, for example, human sacrifice if considered a plague. Regarding methodological considerations, this seems inconsistent. Granted that humans are the most abundant and destructive ecological community, it could be argued that it represents a sort of plague, so to speak. Hence, following this line of thought, we would be led to consider the idea of sacrificing members of the human species in order to avoid an environmental disaster. Nonetheless, and regardless of which position to take regarding this point, there is somehow a natural inclination to discard this thought. This consequence of the standard views’ of holistic environmental ethics has recently been labelled as “environmental fascism” (Regan, 2003, p. 72).

One of the main issues that the holistic view faces – which is related to what was discussed above – is that of considering individuals. Indeed, it is unclear how the notion of moral obligation would work efficiently without causing side effect damage to other individuals. Besides, Regan (2003, p. 73) claims that taking an individualistic account of organisms would actually be in accordance with the goals that the holistic view seeks to

28 See Alasdair Cochrane’s article in: http://www.iep.utm.edu/envi-eth/

46 achieve. To clarify Regan’s position, let us take the following example: individual trees having particular inherent value29 would not be harmed or harm others, since each individual, tree or otherwise, would have inherent value. Hence, a state of mutual respect would be born from enhancing individuality. Nevertheless, even if this seems appealing, neither a holism-minded nor an individual-minded stance resolves a possible conflict of interest when survival is at stake. The main difference between both stances is that holism appears to at least tackle environmental issues, keeping in mind the benefits for the environment in the long run. This means that solutions given by a holistic stance, given its interest in the environment as a whole, might not benefit every individual immediately, but as a long-term goal.

There is a response to Regan’s criticism, which clarifies that attributing moral standing holistically to the environment does not threaten human interests and rights. The general idea is that “granting moral standing to ‘wholes’ is not the same as taking it away from individuals”.30 However, even if we grant this to advocates of holistic environmental ethics, it is still an issue how to solve the problem of a possible clash of interests between wholes and individuals. Regarding this, Callicott claims that while the biotic community matter morally, it is not the only community that matters. Rather, we are part of various nested communities, which means that our obligations to the biotic community may require killing a growing community of rabbits but not humans. This is because humans are part of a tight-knit human community, but a loosely human-rabbit community. Thus, we can explain clashes of interest based on our community commitments. This argument relies on the closeness of each community member to the community itself. In other words, members of a particular community should especially care for the wellbeing of the rest of their own community, since there is a stronger sense of relatability with the needs and desires. Hence, this way of thinking might give ground from which solutions can be taken in accordance to which community you belong to and which communities pose a threat to that wellbeing.

Yet, these ideas are still in conflict with their initial purpose. On one hand, if human relationships are the closest in meaning and interest to us, does this not take us back to an anthropocentric view? On the other hand, if in order to make decisions we

29 For inherent value in here I will understand as “(…) something that has value ‘in itself’ (…) Zimmerman, 2015, Section 2. 30 See Cochrane, Alasdair, London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom, http://www.iep.utm.edu/envi-eth/ for more information.

47 appeal to the idea that the commitment to our community exceeds our commitment to others’, then we lose sight of the idea of pursuing a more balanced coexistence.

It seems that this attempt to justify the moral obligation of humans toward the rest of the biotic community faces a variety of problems. Arguments for holistic environmental ethics available in the literature appear to imply that humans might need to create an objective standard to coexist in an egalitarian way with other organisms. We are left with the enormous problem of discovering this standard and reaching a consensus. Yet, it is necessary to acknowledge that the ambition of creating a strictly objective standard for dwelling seems out of reach. Besides, to know whether this is viable or not in practice, a separate investigation is required.

In the rest of this chapter, I address the concern of living in a balanced manner with the whole biotic community from a different perspective – i.e., from the perspective of the local approach to holistic environmentalism. I will contend that the local reading helps us address the problem of the balanced relationship between humans and their environment, providing attractive answers to some environmental issues. A local approach accommodates each particular case, promoting a local stance that deals with decisions involving the localised interrelations between landscape, the plant kingdom, non-human animals and humans.

In order to do so, I will firstly examine problems of attachment to the land as one of the most important aspects to consider when elaborating a different approach of how to understand a community’s connection to the environment and the way in which we can prompt its care. In this respect, I will look into the idea of cultural views of land that can be found in the sub-discipline of ethnogeography. Secondly, I will briefly put forward the main tenets of what I call local holistic environmentalism.

5.2. Drawing Considerations from Ethnogeography

5.2.1. Attachment

As discussed in Chapter 2, the cultural identity of a particular community needs to have certain general characteristics that are shared by all of its members. One of these elements

48 is a sense of attachment to the particularities of communities, which can range from their lifestyle to physical things like the landscape, flora or fauna.

Accordingly, the idea of attachment is central for the aim of this research, which seeks to determine whether local holistic environmentalism helps communities raise environmental consciousness of their local surroundings. The main reason for this is that it seems easier to enhance the importance of taking care of the environment by means of things to which people experience attachment. This does not mean that attachment is restricted to a single place, instead, as long as there has been a process of proper attachment to a particular place, this can be repeated multiple times. Let us look into Kolers’ view of attachment as it appears in his book Land, Conflict and Justice. A Political Theory of Territory.31

For Kolers, the attachment problem calls into question the grounds on which a claimant supports her argument of a putative claim to a disputed territory. Kolers maintains:

“So a plausible attachment criterion must determine which sorts of links matter for territorial rights, and thereby link each claimant group to a single place rather than several places.” (Kolers, 2009, p. 22)

As according to this passage, it may seem as if the idea of attachment is restricted to only one place. This is because Kolers’ chief objective is to apply this notion to conflicts over territory such as the case between Israel and Palestine. For our purposes, these lines still allow us to emphasise the relevance of the idea of attachment. Although the degree may vary, people and communities can experience attachment to more than one place. Thus, from now on, I will understand the idea of land attachment as referring to the place someone feels the most attached at the time they are dwelling on it, or in other words, the idea of home.

Kolers refers to Levy’s claims on how being a competent claimant can be fulfilled just by being able to fit into his liberalist view (see Kolers 2009, p. 23). This view mainly

31 It is worth noting that even though the author uses this concept in order to frame another discussion, I will use some of his ideas in order to establish the relevance of attachment in this research.

49 consists of considering a group of people as competent claimants of a territory if they have presence in such territory and if they are willing to pay for the use of that territory. Since these requirements can be met by anyone with enough monetary resources (so long as they have presence in a territory), this form of addressing the issue seems unfair relative to other relevant bases of claims, such as longevity of dwelling, and the community’s cultural identification to the place. Hence, the use of attachment as the framework to determine territorial ownership needs to be well-grounded.

However, there is an argument that appears to shed light when dealing with this kind of conflict. The global efficiency argument states that people living in certain territories, with which they become intimately familiar, are the most capable of living efficiently when using the land. Here is a summary of that argument:

“Efficiency of use reduces marginal environmental impacts and permits a more successful geographic division of labour, bringing about greater global economic benefits. Furthermore, nations are likely to be intimately familiar with only one or a very few territories.” (Kolers, 2009, p. 39)

Local holistic environmentalism embraces the efficiency argument with a caveat: the efficiency argument should not immediately imply that a community could be expelled from their land if another group proves to be more efficient. The idea is to consider efficiency in conjunction with other factors such as geo-climatic influence, cultural identity and attachment.

Some concerns may still arise regarding the efficiency argument. This argument conceives land as having value only as a human good. This seems to be problematic when different groups do not agree on the nature of such goods. Besides, if a land is seen solely as an economic good – i.e., as an instrumental source of natural resources – the efficiency argument appears weak when it comes to environmental concerns. Factors such as history, culture, and language, among others, are to be taken into consideration if the efficiency argument is not just another justification for exploiting the land.

Be that as it may, attachment per se is a notion that should not be superficially interpreted. For instance, there is a difference between Cherokees claiming territory over

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Georgia and Mapuches32 claiming territory in parts of southern Chile, since the territories in question and the communities are different. Each of these communities has their own history, culture, geo-climate factors and, hence, both create a specific sense of attachment to specific places. This means that, for instance, even though Cherokee people may have a strong sense of attachment to their own land, non-human animals and the plant kingdom, it is counterintuitive that they can make the same territorial claim over a specific area in parts of southern Chile, or the other way around. To do so, they would need to dwell in parts of southern Chile for enough time so as to feel adapted to geo-climate factors and infused with the local culture. In other words, the ideas of efficient dwelling and a loose understanding of attachment should not be the only considerations when assessing a claim to a territory. This is not to defend or to deny putative rights but to recognise that different kinds of attachments may develop for each particular place.

At issue here is that some political theorists treat land as a passive object only, whose value is restricted to instrumental uses, ignoring other forms of attributing value to it:

“These assumptions ignore the dynamic, bi-directional relationship between people and land – the mutually formative interactions between people and their habitat – and therefore hide the fact that it is impossible fairly to compare the holdings of persons across economies or ethnogeographies.” (Kolers, 2009, p. 64)

Thus conceived, attachment has an important role to play regarding people’s own way to value their environment and this realisation will come to be one of the key points in defending a local holistic environmentalism. There is yet another notion that will help us further develop this argument, namely, ethnogeography.

5.2.2. What ethnogeography teaches us

32 One of the examiners suggested that there is recent biocultural work on Mapuches that could help with the concept of the relationship with land. The reader might be interested in: Rozzi, Ricardo (2013). Biocultural Ethics: From Biocultural Homogenization Toward Biocultural Conservation. In R. Rozzi, S.T.A. Pickett, J.J. Armesto & J.B. Callicott (Eds.), Linking Ecology and Ethics for a Changing World: Values, Philosophy, and Action, Ecology and Ethics 1. Springer, pp 9 – 32.

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Ethnogeography is a sub-discipline from geography that Kolers employs not only to illustrate the discipline itself, but also the field of study that addresses cultural conceptions of land and more precisely the idea of ontology of land33. In the first place, an ethnogeographic community is a group of people that densely and pervasively interact with land use. This interaction has a mutual influence between the community and its surrounding environment. This leads us to the second aspect of what constitutes an ethnogeographic community: members of such community share the same ontology of land, where this conception has been accomplished on the basis of the interaction between community members and the environment.

There is, however, a difference between Kolers’ use of the notion of ethnogeography and the one I have in mind. By recurring to ethnogeography, Kolers attempts to tackle the issue of territorial rights. In particular, he approaches the question of territorial disputes by asking how the environment is constituted and then examining the group of people who really possess the knowledge of taking care of the land. That is, rather than looking into religious or political arguments, analysing who actually knows the area, dwells in it and shares the same ontology of land, seems a more appropriate take on territorial rights. In contrast, I suggest understanding this notion as the physical space where a group of people have developed their lives, habits and a shared ontology of land. More importantly, I suggest the idea that we should understand the communities’ cultural identities in relationship with their environment.

At stake here is the idea of the importance of the community’s connection to the land – i.e. the value and overall importance that a specific place has for a group of people. My focus here will be to point out how the concept of ontology of land may be shared. Note that this takes place either implicitly or explicitly, that is to say: whether communities have consciously embraced a set of values regarding the character of their land, or whether they have simply grown within the shared practices and ideas dominating their community’s interaction with the land.

Kolers (2009, p. 4) maintains that communities who share an ontology of land – but who do not densely interact with land use – should not be considered as ethnogeographic communities. This means, for instance, that it would be difficult to

33 Kolers seems to assume the meaning of ontology of land and only shows superficially certain ideas of what he means with the concept. In this work I will understand ontology of land as the reality that integrates humans with their specific environment.

52 properly claim a shared ontology of land if there are no instances where people actually interact with it. Yet, at this point, Kolers does not clarify what we should specifically expect of this interaction. Indeed, ethnogeographic communities interact with land in a range of ways – e.g., from directly working the land in order to obtain food resources to other activities like enjoying the landscape or simply using its resources. Here is a relevant passage in this regard:

“The members of an ethnogeographic community need not share a primordial identity, political opinions, or even any particular desire to live together. They must, however, be distinguished by densely interacting pervasive patterns of land use and an as-if shared ontology of land. Normally, the pattern of land use and the shared ontology will interact, each affecting the other, and each potentially challenging the other, but over time, they will tend to converge such that the ideology matches the material reality.” (Kolers, 2009, p. 88)

This passage acknowledges that attachment is essential for establishing a different way to approach the problem of growing the awareness of the need of caring for the surrounding environment – even though the description above will not be used to identify those communities which are eligible, as ethnogeographic communities, as Kolers focuses on in his book.

The concept of ethnogeographic community encompasses both significant similarities and differences between groups. It does this without appealing only to differences such as race, ethnicity or nation. Interestingly, ethnogeography shows that such differences and similarities are encompassed by something of a broader scope, which is none other than the ontology of land. In this sense, ethnogeographic communities are not static. Quite the opposite, they continuously transform themselves, leaving open the possibility for new ethnogeographies to appear as a consequence of social development or even by imposition (the case of colonialism and neo-colonialism would be an example of the latter).

An ethnogeographic community symbolises both a material and an intellectual response to a particular environment where such a community has lived over time:

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“That is, the group and the land interact in mutually formative ways: the land is as it is, in both its natural and its built features, because this group has been there; the group is as it is, in both its ideological and its empirical features, because it has been on this land.” (Kolers, 2009, p. 93)

The only aspect of territorial rights that I could consider useful in my research would be that territorial rights allow communities to make operative their ethnogeography, providing the means to bind, control and shape (and be shaped by it in turn) a certain territory. Thus, territorial rights make the interaction with the land possible by means of political, economic and other institutional agreements. Such a relationship with the land is one that should not be underestimated, since – as Kolers (2009, p. 61) points out: “we are all engaged in mutually formative relationships with the land on which we live. Land is as it is (partly) because we make it so, and we are as we are because land makes us so.”

Consequently, when treating states and their citizens in relationship with their territory, we deal with a more complex notion of identity and some questions arise as to what sort of people the citizens of a certain territory will be, what they care about, what the role of the state is towards its citizens, and so forth. Accordingly, “territoriality of the state is important because it is partly constitutive of the identity of the citizens of that state” (See Kolers, 2009, p. 70).

It is for these reasons that ethnogeographic considerations appear to be relevant for the development of my research, allowing for the elaboration of a battery of arguments concerning how people and environment are intertwined and how this affects their lives and also in view of their ethical conceptions about the environment.

The purpose of using ethnogeography in this part of the argument is to provide an understanding of both cultural identity and attachment and how they work within my main proposal, namely local holistic environmentalism. Importantly, I do not consider cultural identity merely as an accidental consequence of attachment to land. Rather, I will pursue the development of a view of cultural identity that acknowledges the influence of geo-climate factors.

5.3. Local Holistic Environmentalism

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It seems that the emergence of a community is not the mere result of a group of people who happen to be in a specific place. Other elements and factors come to play when talking about the conformation of a community such as history, culture and the shared ontology of land. Those factors have an influence on the process of shaping a community in the same way that geo-climate factors do (see Chapter 2).

Herder, in particular, highlights the local dimension of the influence of geo-climate factors. In other words, given different weather and/or geographical constraints, their influence and consequences on human behaviour vary. For instance, communities living in a hotter and more humid environment would tend to behave differently from those in a dry and cold area. Hence, throughout this chapter, I will assume that communities adapt to the surrounding environmental constraints and that attachment to their own surrounding environment may be developed, giving them further reasons to try to cope with harsh conditions. These considerations persuade us of approaching holistic environmentalism from a local perspective.

Herder maintains that before talking about humankind, we firstly need to specify specific geographic regions, since each has different constraints and, hence, different ways to adapt and behave. Thus, changes in behaviour could correlate with environmental constraints and particular ways to shape a community. For example, Herder somehow clarifies of this geo-climatic influence in the behaviour of communities through the claim that communities that live secluded, by mountains, oceans or other kind of physical division, tend to conserve old costumes.

The latter seems to go in the right direction, since it seems there is a correlation with people who seek for a place to settle and adapt to the available resources. Of course, in the current era, with all the possibilities for transportation and trade, there is no necessity to settle down just in places that have the most resources. Nevertheless, there are still some behaviours that can be attributed to the influence of geo-climate factors. For instance, tending to prefer more indoor activities, having a very tight-knit community and close relationships with family are some of the attitudes of communities that tend to be secluded or live in areas with very low temperatures. Note here that I do not intend to argue for a specific set of features for individual communities. Rather, I intend to provide a general account of how the geo-climate influence works. My goal will be accomplished if I can point out the impact of geo-climate factors on the community’s conception of their land – which is, in the end, a source of ethical consideration.

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In view of the holistic approach to environmental ethics, at least two questions arise: first, why should we grant moral standing to the landscape or environment?; and, second, how can we stimulate growing awareness of environmental issues and hence a moral obligation? Section 4.1 showed that the first issue has been widely debated. In this section, I assume that both landscape and the plant kingdom can hold moral standing, at least in the sense of being considered as moral patients.34 To do so will allow me to concentrate on how we should argue for the idea of moral obligation towards the environment once we recognise it as ‘our own’.

In my understanding and the way in which I use this term, holistic environmentalism has a twofold dimension. First, the term holistic intends to involve all participants of particular ecosystems and treats them all as worthy of importance, viewing them as a whole, i.e., as participants that depend on each other. Second, the view is holistic since it assumes that environmental ethics should adopt an interdisciplinary approach (both in theory and in practice) in order to make an actual difference to our way of tackling environmental matters. That is to say, embracing other disciplines such as sociology, economics, politics, and geography, among others, should help strengthen both theory and practice in environmental ethics.

Among the problems a holistic approach to environmental ethics might face, there is the problem of expendability, which is something I conclude from Regan’s criticism of Leopold’s views (Regan, 2003, p. 72). What I mean with this concept is the issue of how vital individuals are in an ecosystem and, therefore, what their degree of expendability is. The problem with expendability lies in the fact that it might be best for an ecosystem to disregard any species that do not really serve the wellbeing of the ecosystem. Of course, in terms of care for the environment we can take some actions to try to achieve a certain level of balance in the environment. However, expendability should not be taken lightly, as seen before in section 5.1 with the example of how extreme can expendability can become by considering humans as a sort of plague, and hence, expendable. Yet at the same time, predators are necessary for reaching ecological balance. They are not always the source of negative environmental shifts; on the contrary, they can sometimes benefit the

34 A proper and deeper argument in favour of the claim of the environment having moral standing would need to be developed in a further research.

56 environment they dwell in.35 However, there is a difference of degrees, since humans have behaved more like environmental destroyers than predators.

Although this seems to point to the idea that humans need to be eradicated, it’s the potential in humans, their knowledge and ability, that makes them worthy of dwelling. Human communities are capable of creating new ways and technologies that may be employed in order to preserve the ecosystem. Thus, humans are able to create a positive shift in the environmental crisis, despite their immense power for destruction.

I do not endorse a strong utilitarian view, even though it may appear useful at first sight. Unlike utilitarians such as Singer, who considers only the strength and nature of the individual’s interests,36 I rather focus on a certain order of steps that lead to achieve a final decision. The idea would be to first arrive at a certain negotiation between the members of an ecosystem in which the damage could be eradicated or at least diminished. Hence, and if all options were exhausted, there could be the space to weigh the interests of both parties.

The reason I give for this argumentative detour is that just directly and firstly arguing for the nature and strength of the interest of an individual leaves open the chance of persuasion in a wrong manner. This means that an apparent morally justifiable harm could be argued as the only option to choose when confronting a particular dilemma with clashes of interest.

Returning to the problem that arises from the idea that every act could be harmful to other communities, it might be useful to talk about clashes of interest. For this, one can take an individualistic stance or a more holistic stance. Neither view is ideal, since for example, there is the issue of individuals trespassing between each other, a fact that seems impossible to avoid as explained before. The main problems with both stances are briefly that an individualistic stance can sometimes be prone to situations in which loopholes can be found to justify the trespassing on the rights of another individual. On the other hand, a holistic stance tends to make sacrifices for the greater good, which seems unfair to some individuals.

35 The case where wolves were reintroduced in Yellowstone National Park created a balance in the whole ecosystem. For more information see http://www.iflscience.com/plants-and-animals/how- wolves-can-save-ecosystem 36 Gruen, Lori, "The Moral Status of Animals", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = .

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In consideration of what was said in previous paragraphs, what I propose in order to tackle the issue of clashes of interests between groups could be seen as a roundabout, however, it has a methodological intention. This intention seeks to exhaust every possible neutral solution for both parties before individually analysing the nature of each group’s interests to determine which party needs the most help. In order to do this, I elaborated what I consider to be steps of considerations when dealing with clashes of interests. First, the holistic sphere needs to be considered. This means that different groups of communities are worthy of consideration, so it is necessary to try to coexist by promoting interactions that can nurture each other. Second, when a dilemma appears in which there is a clash of interest, it is necessary to ask who are the clashing communities and how is it possible to give an alternative solution that can grant both interests. Third, if the situation cannot be tackled with an alternative solution that solves both parties’ interests, then a solution that gives a lesser amount of damage to each party should be taken. Fourth, if there is one community whose interests are less vital than another, then the party with the higher vital interest should be firstly considered. However, this should be done in such a way that the harm done to the lesser vital interest is diminished as much as possible. Finally, these stages should be always be analysed in their own particular circumstances and environmental conditions always keeping in mind the need for sustainability in all of these stages.

The problem with moral obligation through the notion of moral standing seems clear at this point. Unlike the case of humans and non-human animals, moral obligation seems not to be something that can really be inferred from an entity that cannot straightforwardly be seen as having moral standing. Despite this, there are still other ways in which to prompt moral obligation towards the wellbeing of all entities, especially considering the fact that humans are realising the higher ratios in which we are exhausting and polluting.

Other ways in which to prompt the care for the landscape and the plant kingdom could stem from justifications such as survival. This survival should not be understood as only human survival but of the whole ecosystem. Considering survival in this way illustrates the relevance of taking care of not only the interests and wellbeing of humans but of other members of the ecosystem. In other words, trying to coexist with all the members of an ecosystem helps every part to try to fulfil their nature.37 This is not the same as claiming that the plant kingdom and landscape have moral standing, but at the

37 This should not be seen through an exacerbated biocentrism. Here I consider again Leopold’s ideas on the integrity, stability and beauty of the whole ecosystem.

58 same time it does not discourage the idea that at least in a percentage, the wellbeing of plants and the landscape should be considered because of the benefits for all the members of an ecosystem.

There is yet another aspect that could help internalise the moral obligation towards the wellbeing of the landscape and the plant kingdom that is normally not considered, since it does not seem at first sight to be as strong as, for instance, normative ethics. This aspect has to do with aesthetics and the enjoyment of the beauty of landscape and the plant kingdom as a vital part of life and specifically human life. Humans not only need a whole web of intricate and highly rationalised motives to actually have good reasons to feel prone and, even at some point obliged, to adopt positive actions towards the environment. Thus, the reasons to think that there can be moral obligation in this case might not be as popular or controversial as their counterpart in giving moral standing to the plant realm and landscape.

To recapitulate, a local holistic environmentalism considers all of the members of different communities as interconnected. It considers all members as worthy of care through different justifications but is cautious about the scope of this worthiness for each member of the community.

The case of humans and non-human animals seems well-covered by the literature but not so in the case of plants and landscape. The value they have cannot be measured through things like their rationality or ability to suffer. The environment does not consist only for animals; the balance of any hospitable place depends largely on the plant kingdom and landscape. Besides, local holistic environmentalism also considers an adaptable posture to particular situations and places. In other words, I deem this view holistic in the sense that all members are taken into consideration, especially when there is a decision to be taken. This approach needs to be considered in a local manner, that is; all the members of a particular community need to be considered in attention to the particular constraints of the surrounding environment in which they dwell. This is not only for the clear benefit of one member over the other (since we are all interconnected somehow and the fact that we need to coexist with each other), but also because of the sense of cooperation between all the dwellers that actively take part in an ecosystem. This appears obvious from different perspectives in environmental ethics but what I aim is to argue that understanding ourselves as part of a localised whole, as another member of the dwelling creatures around us, can help us grow awareness of the need to take care of the environment.

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In order to have a better idea of a local reading on a holistic environmentalism option that helps communities ease into a more environmentally conscious life, let me provide a brief case worth analysing: the Yaganes community, the aboriginals in the southernmost part of the world.38

Yaganes were aboriginals who lived and coped with the harsh conditions in southern islands of Isla Grande de Tierra del Fuego, extending their presence into Cape Horn. Their worldview was based in a sense of belonging that did not consider any specific representative authority. (See Peralta, 1993, p. 87). This does not mean that the Yaganes were a disorganised and just randomly scattered group but that the way they did structure their community was not conventional. In fact, their reliability on well-normed family structure was essential for survival (Peralta, 1993, p. 89). Besides, they were self- conscious as a community, as can be illustrated by the following quote from Ojeda:

“According to Orquera et al (2012), in the XIX century the indigenous canoeists who lived in southern Tierra del Fuego called themselves Yamana (which means “human, not animal”) and they called their language yaman’hahsha (“human voice”). In other words, their language was an expression of group self-consciousness (…).” (Ojeda, 2012, p. 89)

Regarding the sense of belonging, the Yaganes were linked to their land in a way that is portrayed through their beliefs and myths. For instance, Watauineiwa, one of their deities, was omnipresent, omniscient and managed the visible world to ensure compliance with the moral law and the fate of men. However, he was not considered as the creator of the world but as its steward. Besides, the Yaganes depicted him not as a force but as someone: “the one who is very old”.

From the idea that Watauineiwa was the owner of nature, arises for the Yaganes the value of not to take beyond what you really need and, therefore, not to kill more animals than what was strictly necessary (Peralta, 1993, p. 108). It can be said here that the Yaganes had an ecological sense of their surroundings driven by their beliefs. The Yaganes were very cautious with their resources, even applying a kind of ‘closed season’ for some species in certain periods of a year.

38 I have personally translated most of the quotes from Ojeda and Peralta’s theses.

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The Yaganes also showed their belonging to the land as participants and not dominators of it. They understood they were different from other species, as seen in Ojeda’s quote earlier. Moreover, they saw themselves as greater than the others species (Peralta, 1993, p. 85). Yet, it seems they positioned themselves within the environment, rather than above it. This fact can be seen through a variety of behaviours, from newborn babies being named when born “as the land that welcomed them into the world” (Peralta, 1993, p. 94), to the fact that in their myths they are always involved in some situation with nature but not portrayed as protagonists, rather as just participants. Even their language, which was malleable and agglutinative was tightly connected with their environment: “(…) thus a word being used while in a canoe has a different meaning when uttered to describe the same object while standing on the ground” (Peralta, 1993, p. 103).

Their sense of property followed a similar idea of connection to the land. On the one hand, particular property was highly respected, as long as they could recognise there was someone claiming such property. On the other hand, collective property worked differently. For example, as a collective asset they had two large huts that were used for the puberty initiation ceremony (chehaus)39 and also the secret ceremony for men (kina). Nobody claimed those huts as their own but at the moment the huts accomplished their purpose, both constructions were free to be exploited in terms of materials (Peralta, 1993, pp. 107 – 108).

My purpose in discussing the Yaganes lifestyle is not, of course, to defend the idea that we should live as they did. Nonetheless, the link that exists between the idea of a close relationship with the land and the idea of a certain sense of sustainability is worth pointing out. This case depicts an idea of holism that I want to rescue, since the kind of relationship the Yaganes had with their environment appears not to grant moral standing to things like landscape or the plant kingdom. Yet, at the same time they considered the latter two, animals and themselves as a whole intertwined system that strived and survived together. It is a very interesting view that recognises human beings as different from other species but still a participant species and, most importantly, not as protagonists.

In order to help communities to become more environmentally aware I argue that it is necessary to include a local reading. Each part of the world and each community will have their own environmental constraints. Thus, ideas like belonging to a certain place and the possibility to convert this into ways of seeking sustainability would lack impact

39 This ceremony was performed for men and women.

61 without putting everything in its proper perspective. In other words, it seems more effective to reach out to someone about environmental consciousness if this begins in her ‘own backyard’ and then from this ground build up to a larger scale of issues.

The ideas stated in the previous paragraphs, plus a more localised perspective that considers the attachment to people’s own places, has the potential to generate a better understanding between humans and their environment and of how we should dwell. Thus, also to generate a better means to encourage a more environmentally friendly community. This means that environmentalism, understood in a more localised manner – on a more daily basis, so to speak – could create a momentum of attitudes and actions that could go towards the preservation and good use of resources in all aspects. My point is that instead of beginning the process of developing a more sustainable way of living by focusing on ‘the big picture’, we can see the problems and possible solutions from working first on our ‘own backyard’. Accounting first with what is known, i.e. with something in a more localized manner, in order then to move forward towards more globalized problems is not the same as categorically discard the fact that there are indeed global issues.

Attachment to a place is a strong emotional tie that can make our attitude to living sustainably more meaningful. It might be said that in this current era it is difficult to stay just in one place, hence, it would seem that the process of attachment is harder to make. However, and as discussed before, the process of attachment and the consequence of giving more meaning and care to dwelling places is not something that can only be done once. Nor that it only happens after reaching an elderly age of dwelling in a place or that it is something really meaningful just for certain types of places. On the contrary, people normally develop attachments to more than one thing, or in this case, more than one place.

This view, which still needs improvements, has at least the potential to help with the process of suitable decision-making for specific environmental problems in particular regions of the world. The reason for this can be understood through the idea of localised places working through the scope of a holistic perspective of the place where we dwell. Consequently, it seems a reasonable approach to work out an environmental ethics approach that emphasises this connection and gives environmental moral meaning to this connection.

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6. Concluding Remarks

The main goal of this research was focused on trying to solve some theoretical difficulties in environmental ethics. Nonetheless, there are some aspects that point to a possible change in public policies that deal with the localized environmental issues. This aspect came to be a consequence of the issues addressed in this research and could be explore in more depth in future work.

Throughout this research, I have examined several current issues in environmental ethics. I have endorsed some perspectives among the many approaches available in the literature, in the hope of making clear specific concerns. Among the key points I addressed, surely the one that runs throughout this dissertation, is that of the cultural identity of communities and their intertwinement with the environment. I have contended that geo-climate factors have an influence on the shaping of cultural identity, as well as communities modifying their environment in order to inhabit it, claims for which I have gathered some evidence (see Chapter 2). Bioregionalism, considered as an ecophilosophy, illustrates a possible way to understand the phenomenon of dwelling in a purportedly balanced manner. However, the standard articulation of bioregionalism entails certain problems and it has faced the challenge of substantial criticism (see Chapter 3). Yet, there are some key intuitions worth keeping in mind. Hence, a moderate version of bioregionalism that avoids the problems of the standard version will be more useful (see Chapter 4). A local turn on holistic environmentalism enabled me to encompass the aforementioned topics and provided my argument with an overall perspective on how to tackle the ethical concerns resulting from the interaction between communities and their environment. In particular, I put forward a view, which I called local holistic environmentalism, which makes use of ethnogeographical considerations and attributes importance to the sense of attachment that people in communities experience with respect to the place they inhabit. As seen throughout this research, there is a cultural dimension to the relationship with land. Local holistic environmentalism suggests we should understand our ethical interaction with the environment in a holistic manner, while at the same time circumscribing this interaction within a localised perspective. This required an example of a case study methodology of research, and I suggested the case of the Yaganes community. In short, the local turn suggests that each community should be analysed in view of its own peculiarities, such as their individual geo-climatic constraints (see Chapter 5).

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My hope is that keeping in mind both local and holistic considerations may help us address ethical considerations and increase awareness of environmental issues. As to the holistic perception of human interaction with the environment, it may be claimed that some of the literature has contributed to generate a bad reputation that perpetuates a ‘new age’ stigma on this concept. Such reputation comes from considering a holistic approach along the lines of phrases like “we are one with trees and rivers” or “we feel the feelings of mountains”, and so forth. However, the kind of holism I pursue is rather simple and seeks to demarcate itself from this ‘new age’ stigmatisation. In my proposal, I consider that a community should conceive itself, its needs and desires within an ecosystem, that is, as a member of an ecosystem that also includes non-human animals, the plant kingdom and the landscape. As a first step, this acknowledges that humans are connected with their surrounding environment not only in terms of survival but also in a more meaningful way related to ethical coexistence with other beings and things.

It is important not to forget the local turn of my proposal, since it has represented an essential component. My focus on locality and attachment to environment in which we live has sought to find arguments for motivating environmental awareness. Broadly speaking, this assumes that it is easier to get people to comprehend the relevance of their environment if the concern is shown to them through their ‘own backyard’. This means that the local turn should be understood in its own proper scope. However, it does not mean to imply, for instance, that the global environmental crisis does not need to be addressed. In contrast, it only attempts to prompt people step-by-step into a wider sense of environmental care.

Before closing, I should point out at least three problems that my proposal still faces. It should be noted that there might be other issues within this research but I will just focus on these three main problems. Although I cannot put forward a thorough answer to them here, I will try to articulate possible solutions for future research. These problems are: a) how to introduce local holistic environmentalism in particular societies; b) how to tailor this proposal to particular places; and, c) how to transit from local issues to global issues.

Even though local holistic environmentalism seems to be an appealing proposal, it has not been clarified how the local care for the environment is to be introduced in specific contexts of particular communities. Certainly, there is the claim that this should be done through the peoples’ sense of attachment to the places they dwell in, but it is not easy to

64 see how to present this as a form of knowledge and/or practice that dwellers of different communities should endorse.

The second issue has to do with the focus on locality. Since this proposal relies on the particularities of each place, it would need to adapt to each circumstance in order to efficiently make a change in the way people perceive and care for their environment. Although in this research I have mentioned particular cases as examples, the overall work may not suffice to accept that similar considerations apply to other communities as well. Once again, only the development of more case studies can confirm this – and, as stated above, I will try to do so in future research, assessing the full extent in which we can incorporate local holistic environmentalism as a live alternative in environmental ethics.

Finally, granting that local holistic environmentalism has been properly introduced, there still remains the problem as to how to move from awareness of local ethical issues to awareness of a global environmental crisis. I have stated in Chapter 5 that my intention has not been in any case to overthrow the relevance of global environmental ethics. Instead, I pursued a position that may take longer to reach a desirable effect but that could offer, in the long run, a more efficient way to achieve a community’s environmental awareness. Yet, I acknowledge that an argument should be offered in view of the question of how to transit from local to global environmental problems. The specific challenge is as follows: how to go from creating communities’ environmental awareness to expanding such awareness.

I do not intend to answer these concerns in a few concluding remarks. Yet, allow me to outline possible strategies for future research. The first problem deals with how to introduce local holistic environmentalism in communities. This issue might be addressed from the perspective of educational programs in community schools. In an ideal scenario, such programs would need to be adapted to each community’s environmental constraints and needs. In this respect, comprehension of the value of taking care of the environment should be addressed from an interdisciplinary perspective. How to implement this in classrooms and at the different levels of the education systems requires the addenda of an educational reform. Yet, nothing in principle prohibits this solution: local environmental awareness is an instance of educational practice.

Concerning the second problem, future work should include more detailed case studies in which to actually apply the approach of local holistic environmentalism. This could be benefited with philosophical considerations and also with interdisciplinary work such as sociological and anthropological data related to the question of how this view may

65 work in a specific scenario. I am conscious that my proposal lies in the particularities of each place, so it is difficult to tailor everything for a place and expect that this would work in all other scenarios. Yet, empirical data may shed light on how to articulate the guidelines to suggest relevant considerations that apply to particular communities.

Finally, in pursuing future research, I will strengthen interdisciplinary studies in order to bridge the transition from local to global environmental issues. It is important to note that interdisciplinary studies may take a small-scale project – as it is, for instance, the aim of bioregionalism – into a more globally applicable project. The way it might do this is, for example, to draw economic projections of how local resource can be used in a more sustainable manner and applied this to as many communities as possible. Needless to say, for these economic projections to work within a local holistic view it is necessary to include sociological, anthropological and political studies. These can provide information about how communities behave not only between themselves, but also in their interaction with other communities and probably on even larger scales. Interdisciplinary studies may show the various benefits of taking care of the environment at a global level – and the general trend predominating the debate indeed aims at generating consciousness of global concerns. My take in this dissertation, by contrast, has been to promote ethical awareness by means of the experience of locality, and only then by means of exploring its impact on a larger scale.

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Minerva Access is the Institutional Repository of The University of Melbourne

Author/s: Waissbluth-Kingma, Dominique Alejandra

Title: A local approach to holistic environmentalism: bioregionalism, cultural identity and environmental ethics

Date: 2017

Persistent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11343/194129

File Description: A local approach to Holistic Environmentalism: Bioregionalism, Cultural Identity and Environmental Ethics

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