Place, Ecology and the Sacred: The Moral Geography of Sustainable Communities
Language: English
Pages: 248
ISBN: 1441134069
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
People are born in one place. Traditionally humans move around more than other animals, but in modernity the global mobility of persons and the factors of production increasingly disrupts the sense of place that is an intrinsic part of the human experience of being on earth. Industrial development and fossil fuelled mobility negatively impact the sense of place and help to foster a culture of placelessness where buildings, fields and houses increasingly display a monotonous aesthetic. At the same time ecological habitats, and diverse communities of species are degraded. Romantic resistance to the industrial evisceration of place and ecological diversity involved the setting aside of scenic or sublime landscapes as wilderness areas or parks. However the implication of this project is that human dwelling and ecological sustainability are intrinsically at odds.
In this collection of essays Michael Northcott argues that the sense of the sacred which emanates from local communities of faith sustained a 'parochial ecology' which, over the centuries, shaped communities that were more socially just and ecologically sustainable than the kinds of exchange relationships and settlement patterns fostered by a global and place-blind economy. Hence Christian communities in medieval Europe fostered the distributed use and intergenerational care of common resources, such as alpine meadows, forests or river catchments. But contemporary political economists neglect the role of boundaried places, and spatial limits, in the welfare of human and ecological communities. Northcott argues that place-based forms of community, dwelling and exchange – such as a local food economy – more closely resemble evolved commons governance arrangements, and facilitate the revival of a sense of neighbourhood, and of reconnection between persons and the ecological places in which they dwell.
Place, Ecology and the Sacred: The Moral Geography of Sustainable Communities
Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media
Fishers and Plunderers: Theft, Slavery and Violence at Sea
Ecovillages: Lessons for Sustainable Community
Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything
Fishers and Plunderers: Theft, Slavery and Violence at Sea
And a universal politics, has deep roots in Western Christianity, and before that in Platonism, and it has been advanced in modernity by the Lockean institution of private property, and RE-PL ACING ETHICS IN THE CITY AND COUNTRYSIDE 169 the Enlightenment ideal of a universal ethic. But human beings are phenomenologically place-bound, even although they move around more than other species. It is not possible for persons to thrive without access to food and water, clean air and places to walk.
That in the Christian tradition place is hallowed by events and performances, and in particular the sacramental worship of Jesus Christ, and the cult of the saints. Sheldrake argues, like Eliade, that in the Christian tradition it is events of revelation and witness in the lives of Christians that give to particular places a sacred quality.35 Hence the Holy Land, and especially the places in which Christ dwelt, preached, was crucified and risen, acquired the status of sacred places for.
And fibre for consumption in the city. Currently around 30 per cent of food eaten in Britain is imported in oil-fuelled trucks, planes and ships. Even without climate change, conventional oil – oil that does not come from vastly polluting production methods such as athabasca sands and deep-sea oil – is 64 PL ACE, ECOLOGY AND THE SACRED going to run out. Absent a movement of people back to the land in much greater numbers in the next fifty years, it is doubtful that the food supply as.
Mammals were even higher.4 Hence the goal of the CBD ‘to achieve by 2010 a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss at the global, regional and national level as a contribution to poverty alleviation and to the benefit of all life on Earth’ had not been realised.5 The biggest global cause of biodiversity loss is continuing destruction of moist tropical forest prior to land use change towards commercialscale monocrop plantations such as soya and oil palm. This destruction is.
Household economic activity has the purpose of sustaining family and community and in this personal context is more likely to be characterised by the virtues of justice and temperance.66 However, modern economists since Adam Smith argue that the business enterprise is capable of promoting the good of others regardless of whether it is a family business or a large-scale multinational economic corporation operating in many places at once, provided those who work in it devote themselves to making.