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

© 2017 Dominique Alejandra Waissbluth-KingmaIn 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