Down to Earth: Persons in Place in Natural History
—Light, Smith, Philosophy and Geography 1998

"Down to Earth: Persons in Place in Natural History." Pages 285-296 in Andrew Light and Jonathan M. Smith, eds., Philosophy and Geography III: Philosophies of Place. Lanham, MD: Roman and Littlefield, 1998. Online at: http://hdl.handle.net/10217/48070

On Earth living things have home territories. Biology, the logic of life, is always historical or "geographical," graphed out as world lines by embodied beings emplaced in Earth's natural history. Cultural history brings radical innovations. Modern humans do not live in niches in ecosystems; culture and agriculture, industry and technology transform those dependencies. Still, life remains storied residence on landscapes, where culture is, or ought to be, in harmony with nature. Humans can stand apart from the world and consider themselves in relation to it. An earth ethics ought to discover a global obligation to the whole inhabited planet.

Also published In Rana P. B. Singh, ed., Environmental Ethics: Discourses, and Cultural Traditions: Festschrift to Arne Naess (Varanasi, India: The National Geographical Society of India, 1993), pages 55-63; also published as the National Geographical Journal of India, vol. 39, parts 1-4, 1993.