Humanity's Most Urgent Wake Up Call in History (original) (raw)
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Organization & Environment, 2005
The past century has witnessed unprecedented economic growth and prosperity along with unprecedented depredations upon nature. To resolve these developments, there is debate between two moral postures. One takes a human-centered, or anthropocentric, view of our relationship to nature to emphasize the value of securing the resources needed for further development. The other takes an environment-centered, or ecocentric, view of our relationship to nature to emphasize the value of conserving her integrity and beauty. This article explores tensions underling these two views and finds that neither adequately reconciles us to nature. This article offers an alternative, theocentric view of our relationship to nature, founded upon Catholic Christianity, that reconciles in God our value for resources and nature and establishes a divine order of man and nature apart from human egoism and intentions. This article concludes with a discussion of the implications of this theocentric view for environmental policy and practice.
Roots of (and Solutions to) our Ecological Crisis. A Humanistic Perspective
Ecological Civilization, 2023
Research into the sources of contemporary ecological crisis as well as ways to overcome it has been conducted for several decades. Rich academic literature provides numerous attempts to identify the causes of the crisis and its solutions. The ecological crisis is extremely complex and variously conditioned. Therefore, I focus on determining only two sources of the crisis and, respectively, two solutions. Since the late 1960s, monotheistic religions, Christianity in particular, have been made responsible for the environmental crisis. Christianity is accused of forwarding two theses which are harmful to the environment: 1. The sole purpose of nature is to serve man. 2. By God's will, man is endowed with unlimited power over nature. I attempt to overcome this understanding of the source of the crisis by showing the interpretation of the Bible which contradicts the above-mentioned theses. Moreover, I show "the ecological potential" of the Judeo-Christian and Muslim traditions. As the second source of the crisis I indicate modern thought: 1. Man's alienation from nature as the result of the Cartesian division of reality into res cogitans and res extensa. 2. Francis Bacon's program: the study of nature is the task of natural sciences alone; nature is devoid of value in itself. 3. The mathematization of nature made it possible for the natural and technical sciences to develop rapidly, which contributed to the industrial revolution. I look for an antidote to this cause of the crisis in Klaus M. Meyer-Abich's idea of man's peace with nature which he developed as part of the practical philosophy of nature. I believe that revealing our inseparable bond with nature and showing compassion towards nature may help overcome the destructive consequences of modern thought.
Many of us recognise that humanity faces the greatest emergency in our existence – a crisis far deeper and more complex than many of us are able to recognise. Our emergency comprises many catastrophic risks, including resource scarcity, ecological collapse and extinction, global overheating, food insecurity, weapons of mass destruction, global and local pollution with ongoing poisoning of air, waters and lands, pandemic diseases, population overgrowth, and uncontrolled new technologies. Underlying these risks is widespread apathy to Beauty, Goodness, Truth, and a Sense of the Sacred in All Living Beings on our Planet, with many people trapped in all sorts of collective and individual delusions. Many voices have raised their concerns about these threats – and here I add mine to them. These risks are all interlinked. None of them can be solved simply in isolation. However, they can be overcome – with universal cooperation, persistent goodwill, and bold determination. No government yet has a comprehensive plan for dealing with these inter-acting sets of risks that endanger our civilization, our own and children’s futures, and life on our Planet as an abundant ecosystem and home for all species. Here we call on the governments, institutions, cultures, and peoples of our Planet to develop a clear plan and a pathway for Human Survival in the 21st century, URGENTLY. We also urge the propagation of local and worldwide discourses across and amongst diverse actors, with all of us working, planning, and acting NOW, to address all of these risks, altogether, in ways that make none of them worse. Here we make a delicately nuanced attempt to envision fairer, safer, healthier, and more sustainable futures for all peoples and all living beings on our Planet. (Adapted from a recent The Council for the Human Future statement)
The need to respect nature and its limits challenges society and conservation science
Increasing human population interacts with local and global environments to deplete biodiversity and resources humans depend on, thus challenging societal values centered on growth and relying on technology to mitigate environmental stress. Although the need to address the environmental crisis, central to conservation science, generated greener versions of the growth paradigm, we need fundamental shifts in values that ensure transition from a growth-centered society to one acknowledging biophysical limits and centered on human well-being and biodiversity conservation. We discuss the role conservation science can play in this transformation, which poses ethical challenges and obstacles. We analyze how conservation and economics can achieve better consonance, the extent to which technology should be part of the solution, and difficulties the “new conservation science” has generated. An expanded ambition for conservation science should reconcile day-to-day action within the current context with uncompromising, explicit advocacy for radical transitions in core attitudes and processes that govern our interactions with the biosphere. A widening of its focus to understand better the interconnectedness between human well-being and acknowledgment of the limits of an ecologically functional and diverse planet will need to integrate ecological and social sciences better. Although ecology can highlight limits to growth and consequences of ignoring them, social sciences are necessary to diagnose societal mechanisms at work, how to correct them, and potential drivers of social change.
2010
What in the world is happening to our planet and why? We live in a wounded world that is in dire need of healing. We all should be troubled and terrified by what we have done and continue to do. Humans have made huge and horrific global messes that need to be repaired now. The overriding sense of turmoil is apparent to anyone who takes the time to pay attention. Researchers and non-researchers alike are extremely concerned about unprecedented global losses of biodiversity and how humans suffer because of our destructive ways. We are animals and we should be proud and aware of our membership in the animal kingdom. However, our unique contribution to the decimation of the planet and its many life forms demeans us. Humans are big-brained, invasive, and omnipresent mammals who seem to think they can do almost anything they want. Individuals in most cultures claim to love nature and other animals but then go on to abuse them in a multitude of ways. Clearly, our relationship with the rest...
We Must Live WITH Nature, NOT Against Nature, in Our Climate Crisis
Here all of us are in CODE RED with our escalating climate crisis, with our current business-as-usual trends already condemning ourselves to 1.5°C degrees of global heating by about 2030, and, given that for many of us changing ourselves is much too hard, already re-signing ourselves to allowing around 3.0°C degrees of global heating within the lives of a generation or two! Indeed, each of us, all of us, are living in very challenging times. In addition to dooming ourselves to inhabiting increasing global heating for many forthcoming decades, we have • our ongoing challenges with Covid into the foreseeable future • our ongoing decline of biodiversity and life on Earth, with Sir David Attenborough saying emphatically, “Our planet is headed for disaster. We need to learn how to work with nature; rather than against it.” • Harald Sverdrup et al.’s ongoing research into the limits of current supplies and declining resource quality, compounding within forthcoming years, of key resources, that are expected to be needed in transforming from degenerative to regenerative economies • current economic systems that deliberately 1) fail to consider the necessity of living within our planet’s limited ecological thresholds, and 2) fail to provide secure social foundations for everybody with everybody in genuine intragenerational and intergenerational justice, and • political systems that 1) fail to go beyond divisive debates between various “us” versus “them” contenders, 2) fail to generate diversity informed “all of us, interconnecting with each other” dialogues, and 3) fail to work to integrate what is good, true, and beautiful in the various contributions amongst various rightsholders. Behind all of these existential crises, however, is our key metaphysical crisis in our understanding of Nature. Is ‘NATURE’, the tribhuvana in the Vedic East, the tripartite kosmos in the Latin-Greek-West, composed of corpus-soma-body, anima-psyche-soul, and spiritus-pneuma-heart, altogether? Or, do we continue to blind ourselves in believing ‘nature’ is simply reducible to limited measurable entities within modern Cartesian space-time? Our choices decide our futures!