ABSTRACT
What might it mean to take the idea of an emotional and ethical geo-graphy seriously? Could our ethical feelings towards the Earth and its inhabitants be (re)inscribed in a language of closeness or distance, bounded or open-ness, space and/or place that might express something of our environmental concerns? Could talk of being ‘moved’ by nature be regarded as more than merely metaphorical? If so, then geography might cease to be understood merely as a disciplinary field or practice to which pre-existing ethical theories are applied as though they were sticking plasters. Rather, we might begin to explore the myriad possibilities for writing and valuing a world, the affective and ethical significance of which has been marginalized by modernist geographical and philosophical paradigms. Perhaps certain geographies might become expressions of environmental ethics, of our passionate concerns for ‘natural’ places.
