This article provides an essay on environmental ethics.
The earth is remarkable and valuable for both the nature and the culture that occur on it. Evolutionary history has been going on for billions of years, while cultural history is only about a hundred thousand years old. But Certainly, from there onward, culture increasingly determines what natural history shall continue.
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The debate about ethics as applied to nature asks whether the primary values about which we continue. The debate about ethics as applied to nature asks whether the primary values about which we should be concerned are cultural, that is, anthropocentric, or whether there is also intrinsic natural value, independent of humans, which humans ought to consider.
Although all deliberate human behaviors differ from the processes of spontaneous nature, some are healthy for humans because they agree with the natural systems with which their cultural decisions interact. In a relative sense, what humans do can be nature conservation values, but are not the only value; there are numerous values autonomous to cultures. Some of these can be gained by the sacrifice of natural.
So the environmental ethics of the century will increasingly have to ask whether and why cultures should preserve any natural values at all and what kind of balance ought to be reached?
It is true that the Earth is now in a post-evolutionary phase. Culture is the principal determinant of Earth’s future, more now than nature – we have passed into a century when this will be increasingly obvious.
Indeed, some say that will be the principal novelty of this new millennium – Earth will be a managed planet. The management of the planet must conserve environmental values. Hopefully such policy can, in places, let nature take its course.
At this point, on the eve of the 21st Century, it has become clear that humankind is facing one of the greatest challenges of recorded history; how to reconcile continued economic growth and all that this implies with constraints imposed by a shrinking resource base and an increasingly degraded environment.
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If we do not want merely to cast ourselves on the seas of changes we should use our knowledge of the historical processes that helped shape human technological powers to orient ourselves.
The human race and nature are products of evolutionary process, subject to the final test of survival. And the evidence of human resourcefulness in the art of environmental husbandry can be charted throughout our evolution from Neolithic food – gathering bands to agro-industrial society.
We shall, therefore, hereunder consider the relation between the inner dynamics of beliefs, values and goals and the outer dynamics of agricultural, industrial and ecological transformation in order to discover how we have survived through the creative values of our inner evolution.
The World Commission for Environment and Development was called upon by the General Assembly of the UN to draw up a global agenda for change in our patterns of environmental use. The clear message of the report, named after the chair of the commission, former Prime Minister Brundtland of Norway, reminds all that we have – only one Earth for our survival.
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The report touched the sensibilities of many people, on development, but more importantly, it paved the way for the heightened global concern that preceded the Earth Summit of 1992.
Scientific innovation is an indispensable step towards the search for sustainable development. UNESCO’s Man and Biosphere Programme (MAB), launched in 1968, is one such endeavour which seeks to match science and ideas in the search for human survival on Earth.
One the whole, people are rapidly approaching a crossroads of crisis. But drawing from past and the new found activities, driven by environmental ethics and scientific innovation within individual nations and the international community, there is yet some hope for man and planet Earth.