ABSTRACT
In the Western industrialized countries (the United States, Australia and some European countries), environmental ethics has developed as an academic discipline that examines the relationship between the environment and human beings. This approach to ethics was mainly influenced by Christian– Anglo-Saxon beliefs and was developed by philosophers, environmentalists and scholars, and it is different to the one seen in Japan. There, the knowledge and experience gained by communities were the basis on which scholars, who worked closely with those societies, shaped the code of environmental ethics.
