Place-based analysis and sustainability: A toposophic lens for moral accountability to physical and cultural landscapes and quality of life

Women farmers in the sustainable agriculture movement in the Midwestern United States serve as a case study to develop a place-based analysis to deepen social and environmental ethical reflection. Three moral concerns emerge from the case study analysis in this dissertation: (1) the need women voice for more women's networking inside of the sustainability movement; (2) the importance to sustainable agriculture of the broad range of concerns of the surrounding community; and (3) the need for attention to an elasticity of women's work, divided amongst farming, home and community, that diminishes their quality of life. I argue that a normative definition of sustainability must include flourishing social justice.; An interdisciplinary approach is required to understand these moral concerns. The disciplines brought to bear on these issues in this dissertation are rural sociology, environmental ethics, spirituality, human geography, and feminist economic theory.; This dissertation proposes a toposophic place-based analysis which addresses the wisdom of landscapes of the human and more-than human world. A toposophic place based-analysis is a tool to reflect on what brings and/or diminishes flourishing quality of life. Such an analysis would help to address the moral issues this project examines and to develop the social justice agenda for sustainable agriculture ethics.; This dissertation further proposes that a sense of place is an intangible, but significant spiritual component of quality of life. Moreover, it argues that using a place-based analysis it will be more possible to achieve sustainability defined as sufficient production of food; vibrant biodiversity; and just economic and social structures that are culturally plural.