How can I reference the local environment within a function, in R?

To get the current environment, just call environment().

In general, sys.frame returns any of the environments currently on the call stack, and sys.nframe returns the current depth of the call stack. sys.frames returns a list of all environments on the call stack.

environment(f) returns the closure environment for a function f (where it will look for functions and global variables).

parent.env(e) returns the parent environment where it will look if a symbol is not found in e.

f <- function() {  function() list(curEnv=environment(), parent=parent.env(environment()),           grandParent=parent.env(parent.env(environment())), callStack=sys.frames(),           callStackDepth=sys.nframe())}g <- function(f, n=2) if (n>2) g(f, n-1) else f()floc <- f() # generate a local functiong(floc, 3) # call it

This will call the local function floc with a stack depth of 3. It returns a list with the current environment, it's parent (the local environment in f), and it's grand parent (where f was defined, so globalenv). It also returns the list of stack frames (environments). These are the environments for the recursive calls in g (except the last one which is the current environment of floc).