Environmental ethics concepts and applications

Environmental Ethics

The natural world has taken approximately 4.5 billion years to reach the form we currently see today. All the diversity of life we are currently familiar with gradually sprang from the first single-celled organisms -- human are no exception. The biological processes of natural selection and sexual selection have ultimately resulted in some of the most beautiful and interesting plants and animals that could ever be imagined. As part of this process, humans -- as observed from an objective perspective -- could almost be thought of as a plague. We have descended on the land like locusts, devoured and destroyed everything in our path, with completely no concern outside of our own sustenance. On a geologic timescale humans are hardly worth mentioning; even the most generous estimates place the origin of modern man to 2 million years ago. By comparison to the millions of organisms that came before us, our success has been extremely short-lived and, like locusts, self-destructive.

The manner by which humans utilize the earth's resources is not only detrimental to the survival of other species, but also to our own. For example, the worldwide use of oil as a source of energy is growing exponentially; as humans drill deeper and in more locations the world's wildlife is pushed aside in the name of profit. Additionally, global warming threatens to permanently alter our climate, further risking the natural world and our own survival. As if that were not enough, the use and drilling of oil is increasing at a time when it should be decreasing. It has been recognized that oil is a finite resource that will eventually run out, and in so doing, threaten very the fabric of civilization: this aspect of human negligence is directly analogous to a plague. Even with a level of consciousness far beyond all the organisms that came before us, and even though we know our current practices will lead to eventual disaster, humans continue to behave in a manner concerned with only immediate benefits.

Doubtlessly, some could make the argument that this sort of behavior is perfectly aligned with the principles of evolution; namely, that organisms behave in their own, immediate self-interest. Extending this notion to humans, it should be anticipated that we expend all of our natural resources before we implement new solutions, and also, that we be unconcerned with competing species. This is a strong argument. There is no way to directly refute this sort of perspective, but I am sill inclined to take issue with it. It appears that this outlook on life is a mere justification for practices and institutions that are already in place, and therefore, are reluctant to change their ways. I would argue that humans are, debatably, the first organisms on earth to possess a high level of deductive reasoning, and that we also have an innate appreciation for beauty and the value of that beauty. Because of this, humans should be concerned with other species of life; they possess inherent value not measurable by human advantage.

Some Christians might attempt to assert that the plants and animals of the world were created by God for the use by mankind; and accordingly, those that are not useful in a productive way are not worth saving. Again, I deny this claim and am inclined to believe that the organisms and plants in existence today have value simply because they have taken billions of years to come into existence, and through processes that we could never hope to duplicate. This makes them strange, unique, interesting, beautiful, ugly, and yes, sometimes useful for industry or medicine. Saving only the organisms that might generate some type of human profit is behavior that suggests mankind has no consciousness and no foreknowledge of the consequences of his actions. It suggests that we act like simple beasts, without any compassion for the planet we owe our survival to.

Of course, living in the world today -- and particularly in the United States -- it is difficult to perform almost any action without harming the natural environment. The fact that the U.S. has never adopted a workable public transportation system on a large scale demands that I drive a car. Obviously, this is true for most Americans: we cannot earn a living with out a car. But meanwhile, I am perfectly aware that I am contributing to the worldwide increase of greenhouse gases. This distresses me because, although I possess no real power to force our nation to build more realistic forms of mass transportation, I feel that the least I could do is refrain from using more of the world's oil -- as generally ineffectual as that may be. However, my livelihood depends on my own small contribution to this much larger problem. Generally, the way our society is structured requires that our responsibilities to the natural world conflict with our actions.

I remember when I was twelve years old and I was visiting my grandfather. He spent most of his time holed-up in the log cabin he built in northern Minnesota; concerning himself with copping wood and other things most people would rather not bother with. Only recently, wildlife advocates had re-introduced the wolf into northern Minnesota. This was causing my grandfather unique levels of distress. Clearly, the wolves posed no real threat to his personal safety, but they did present a new danger to the dogs he kept tethered outside. Personally, I thought wolves were just about the coolest animals that North America had ever produced; so naturally, I wanted to see one. I told this to my grandfather and he handed me a shotgun. He was joking, of course, because it was illegal to shoot the animals but the incident had an impact on me. It illustrated to me the different ways people can perceive their relationship with nature. My grandfather saw his relationship with these wolves as an adversarial one: he wanted his dogs, and the wolves probably did too. This form of direct conflict with nature is rarer today than it was several hundred years ago -- that was the time when humans essentially eradicated this continent of all major predatory species. Currently, the ways we damage the environment are usually more inadvertent than shooting a wolf trying to eat your livestock.