Ethics of Place
It may be for this reason Charles Wilkinson attempted to construct a framework for change built around an ethic of place. An ethic of place sets the parameters for change, within which people might challenge traditional means of policymaking by building upon their collective understanding of place.
Wilkinson first put forth his theory in an essay for the Northern Lights Institute.44 Wilkinson suggested, in that essay, too much policy within the western region of the United States had been constructed at “loggerheads” with results accruing by confrontation. He argued westerners should instead develop an “ethic of place.” Such an ethic, he maintained,
respects equally the people of the region and the land, animals, vegetation, water, and air. An ethic of place recognizes that Western people revere their physical surroundings and that they need and deserve a stable, productive economy that is accessible to those of modest incomes. An ethic of place ought to be a shared community value and ought to manifest itself in dogged determination of the society-at-large to treat the environment and its people as equals, to recognize both as sacred, and to insure that all members of the community not just search for, but insist upon, solutions that fulfill the ethic.45
Although Wilkinson admitted this approach is “linked in some degree to the emerging theory of “bioregionalism,” he was realistic enough to admit his argument was in “no sense a suggestion that we rework our angular state lines to conform to river basins – that is not going to happen, nor would the transaction costs make it worthwhile.”46 Thus while Wilkinson remained an admirer of Sale and a great many deep ecologists, he went to great lengths to point out an ethics of place “borrows from biocentric reasoning without adopting it wholesale.”7
Politics of Place
Former Missoula Montana Mayor Dan Kemmis offered a less bioregional but certainly land
based perspective that went directly at Wilkinson’s framework, by arguing Wilkinson’s
system is public only insofar as it is scientific
and logical. Kemmis found people living in the American West suffered under the notion of empire, where they were regarded not as distinct individuals inhabiting a particular place and deciding for themselves what direction their lives would take, but as people occupying a territory controlled by a corporate state through its administrative procedures. Under such an arrangement, the republican possibilities for the region were undermined in “subtle but fundamental ways.”48 For Kemmis, the goal for people in the region was to move “from territoriality to common ground."49
And, the only way to accomplish this was to re-inhabit a place.
For Kemmis, it was important to understand what it means to inhabit a place. He believed “to inhabit a place is to dwell there in a practiced way, in a way which relies upon certain regular trusted habits of behavior.”50 This did not rely upon a strict bioregional perspective, however:
The political philosophy of the bioregionalists tends to be more vague, uncertain, often more than a little precious and utopian. A more solid, and therefore more confident understanding of how place-centered practices could transform public life would do much to make re-inhabitory politics more credible. The civic republics are
developing very valuable insights into this potentially transformative power of homely
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An ethic of place ought to be a shared community value and ought to manifest itself in dogged determination of the society-at-large to treat the environment and its people as equals.
- Charles WIlkinson, "Toward an Ethic of Place"