CRITICAL ISSUES IN FUTURE ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS
1. Sustainable development vs. sustainable biosphere. The question is
whether to prioritize development within environmental constraints, or
whether to prioritize a sustainable biosphere and work out a suitable
economy within that priority. Sustainable development, likely to remain
the favored model, is also likely to prove an umbrella concept that
requires little but superficial agreement, bringing a constant illusion of consensus and glossing over deeper problems with a rhetorically engaging
word. Everybody co-opts the idea and justifies their desired
developments. Sustainability will prove to be a “metafix” that will unite
everybody including industrialists, subsistence farmers, fair-wage social
workers, riverkeepers, wildlife lovers, economists, and politicians—all of
whom wish to have their cake and eat it too.
In tension with this, a “sustainable biosphere” model demands a
baseline quality of environment, with the economy worked out “within”
such quality of life in a quality environment (clean air, water, stable soils,
attractive residential landscapes, forests, mountains, rivers, rural lands,
parks, wildlands, wildlife, renewable resources). Development is desired,
but even more, society must learn to live within the carrying capacity of
its landscapes. The fundamental flaw in “sustainable development” is that
it sees the Earth as a resource only.
2. Global warming. Global warming is a threat of the greatest magnitude,
involving an unprecedented convergence of complexities, natural
and technological uncertainties, global and local interactions, and difficult
scientific, ethical, political, and social choices. There are
cross-cultural issues, intergenerational issues, distributional issues, concerns
about merit, justice, benevolence, and about voluntary and
involuntary risk. There is a long lag time from decades to hundreds of
years. Surely but gradually, local “goods” cumulate into global “bads”.
There are opportunities for denial, procrastination, self-deception,
hypocrisy, free-riding, cheating, and corruption. Individual and national
self-interests are at odds with collective global interests. This is the
“tragedy of the commons” now taken at the pitch.
3. Biodiversity. Charismatic megafauna is likely to disappear, except
in pockets. Conservation plans will increasingly need to incorporate local
communities and governments in developing nations which are too unstable
(if not corrupt) to insure long-range conservation. Fauna and flora
generally are likely to become increasingly depauperate, due to development,
pollution, ignorance, and disinterest outside of native-range
industrial, medical, and agricultural resource benefits. The planet is likely
to become less diverse, warmer, increasingly trashy, and weedy.
4. Escalating populations, escalating consumption, maldistribution. These are three main global problems (drivingfor instance, global warming
and depauperate fauna and flora). Global capitalism has no intrinsic
capacities to solve these problems. A major problem is that products and
capital move freely across national boundaries, but labor cannot, resulting
in exploitation of cheaper labor. In addition to the human misfortunes
produced by this system, such exploited peoples will progressively
degrade their environments. As a result, both rich and poor will jeopardize
both sustainability and conservation.
5. The “enough” problem. Humans have long been driven by desires
to increase security and wealth. Humans have Pleistocene appetites for
salt, sugar, fat, sex, and to maximize our short-term security for self and
kin, and perhaps tribe. Without such concerns, people did not make it
through winter. So humans always want more in order to make us more
secure—more pay, bigger houses, better health, more preferences satisfied,
more comfort, economic and national security. For all of human
history, we have been pushing back limits.
Especially in the West, we have lived with a deep-seated belief that life
will get better, that one should hope for abundance, and work toward
obtaining it. In the West we have built this into our concept of human
rights—a right to self-development, to self-realization. But such an egalitarian
ethic scales everybody up and drives an unsustainable world.
Humans are not well equipped to deal with the sorts of global level
problems we now face. The classical institutions—family, village, tribe,
nation, agriculture, industry, law, and medicine—have shorter horizons.
Humans have no evolutionary ability to deal with long-range problems
on world scales. Many biologists think we are incapable of doing this at
the ranges now demanded. A few educated persons can think and act at
long-ranges, but to move six billion persons to a biospheric level of concern
is difficult. Interestingly, the main historic institutions that show
some capacity here are world religions.
6. Anthropocentrism versus intrinsic values in nature. Whether
humans, one species among five to ten to 50 million on Earth, conserve
nature only in their enlightened self interest or (also) with concern for the
integrity of nonhumans is perennial and will remain important. Conservation
of biodiversity is likely to prove partial and inadequate if grounded
only in human benefits and without a more comprehensive respect for life on Earth. Humans will remain morally naive so long as they live in a reference
frame where one species takes itself as the center of value and
values everything else relative to human reference frames. “Good for us”
versus “good kind” and “good in itself” will remain a challenging issue in
environmental ethics.
7. Human uniqueness. Humans as part of or apart from nature will
remain a perennial issue. Humans are a unique species with unique capacities,
as evidenced in language and culture, proved by their ability to place
the planet in jeopardy, and proved by human concerns in environmental
ethics. Placing humans in relation to the larger community of life on the
planet will remain challenging, even paradoxical, with humans transcending
spontaneous wild nature even as they seek to conserve such
nonhuman nature.
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