Center for Humans and Nature

Anja Claus presents “Chicago Wilderness: A Case Study in Ethics of Place”

October 20th, 2011

“Chicago Wilderness: A Case Study in Ethics of Place” to be presented at this year’s fifteenth annual International Association for Environmental Philosophy conference, October 23-24, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. This paper is a synopsis of Anja Claus’, Center for Humans and Nature Program Organizational Coordinator, master thesis at Northeastern Illinois University, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies. (Click here for the abstract)

Anja’s research focuses on understanding how urban spaces can facilitate the development of environmental ethics. How do we inspire people to have a feeling and respect for nature with in metropolitan areas where most of the human population now resides – spaces often misunderstood as un-conducive to an ethics of place? She argues that such spaces do exist and can be intentionally shaped with in urban settings; for example, by the environmental consortium, Chicago Wilderness.

Ethics of Place

The theoretical element of the thesis is based on philosopher Mick Smith’s ‘ethics of place’ theory presented in his book “Ethics of Place: Radical Ecology, Postmodernity, and Social Theory”. Here Smith lays the foundation for an environmental ethic based in complexity and multiplicity of place and focused on individual autonomy taking precedents over distant, top-down managerial schemes. Anja argues that Chicago Wilderness fosters such an ethical ethos.

Mick Smith’s ‘ethics of place’ is an alternative to current ethical theories which often confine ethics to an abstract theoretical tool for passing judgment and evaluating actions at a distance, rather than embedded in an intimate relation to relevant others. Smith’s goal is to reconstitute our ethical relations to natural others by encouraging us to imagine new forms of ethical space where moral and physical spaces are reconnected. For Smith this requires the human passions, our emotions, feelings, be reconnected with our experience of co-habiting with human and non-human others – where social, historical, and environmental particularities of place are not denied. And this calls for sensitivity to locality and context.  A space not conducive to the homogenization of place, this ethical space must instead recognize prior presences and stories in all of their difference.

Ecological Conception of Place

Central to this argument is an ecological conception of place. This place is a process of interactions between humans, non-human others and the environment itself. Here place is produced through continual interactions between things encountering each other. In a very real sense, places are constitutive of all our interactions.   It produces affective encounters through its spatial layouts and by triggering cues to memory and behavior.  Geographer, Nigel Thrift sees place as a complex process of embodiment where place is an actor in producing affects – like love, hate, sympathy, hope and despair.  Thus certain places can and do bring us to life in certain ways, whereas others do the opposite. An ‘ethics of place’ conceptually requires this different understanding of place – one based on changing relations with community and environment.

Chicago Wilderness?

So what would this ethics look like on the ground? Looking to Chicago Wilderness we can uncover a model for such an ethical ethos. Anja argues that Chicago Wilderness is not only an effective restoration entity but an organization that expresses an ‘ethics of place’ through the values it holds, the activities it facilitates and the creation of places where natural others can express their differences.

For more information about this project please contact Anja Claus at anjaclaus@humansandnature.org or stay tuned for future entries as the thesis work continues.