Volume 11, Issue 2, Summer 1989
Jim Cheney
Pages 117-134
Postmodern Environmental Ethics
Ethics of Bioregional Narrative
Recent developments in ethics and postmodemist epistemology have set the stage for a reconceptualization of environmental ethics. In this paper, I sketch a path for postmodemism which makes use of certain notions current in contemporary environmentalism. At the center of my thought is the idea of place: (1) place as the context of our lives and the setting in which ethical deliberation takes place; and (2)
the epistemological function of place in the construction of our understandings of self, community, and world. Central to these themes, in tum, are the related notions of myth, narrative, storied residence, and ethical vernacular.