A New Environmental Ethics: The Next Millennium for Life on Earth by Holmes Rolston, III

2014 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 255-256
Author(s):  
Melissa Clarke ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Moreira ◽  
Fátima Alves ◽  
Ana Mendonça

Contemporary sciences and societies are facing several problems when analyzing the relationship between the natural and social dimensions of the world as reflected in the field of education. A serious effort must be urgently made to identify and tackle environmental problems in order to understand the world in which we live, in ways that are beneficial to present and future life on Earth. In this context, it is fundamental to create a new social order in a way that thinking “out of the box” can emerge with other orders closer to the diversity of life that coexist on the planet. Consequently, the awareness of the complexity and multidimensionality of our world requires the building of new forms of reflexivity and the development of critical thinking, reversing the still predominant characteristics of modern societies such as compartmentalization of knowledge, unhealthy competition, profit-seeking motivations, the exploitation of nature, and excessive individualist and anthropocentric approaches. In this regard, educational institutions play a relevant role in shaping future human actions to be more ethically harmonic (both environmentally and socially) as they are sites of knowledge production and sharing. Hence, it is crucial to rethink the entire educational paradigm and learning system (objectives, curricula, pedagogical strategies, instruments, competencies, school management framework, and even school buildings), because schools often function as “islands,” isolating students from nature, the community, and the “real world,” not preparing them to be well-informed and conscious citizens nor for the challenges that lie ahead. Some theoretical and practical alternatives are needed since schools actually embody the paradoxes and dilemmas of the current societal malaise but have not yet been able to deal with them or to provide adequate effective responses.


Author(s):  
Cristina Beckert ◽  

This paper aims at showing the interdependence between aesthetic and ethic values in appreciating nature. The Kantian concept of sublime guides us in the first part, exhibiting the primacy of ethics over aesthetics, as the sublime reveals it self to be an analogon of the moral law and the respect due to it. The second part, based on the holistic tendency in Environmental Ethics hold by Holmes Rolston III and others, analyses how the relation is inverted by means of an aesthetic of the invisible, where the sublime in nature refers to the whole and is hidden under the apparent ugliness of the parts.


Author(s):  
Robin Attfield

For centuries we have been changing the natural world around us, through hunting and farming; building, mining, and engineering; and travelling and trading. But we can no longer take it for granted. ‘Origins’ outlines the rise of ecological science in the 20th century and the new awareness of the unexpected side-effects of human impacts on the environment raised by Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1949) and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). It also describes the emergence of environmental ethics with the work of philosophers Richard Routley, Arne Naess, and Holmes Rolston III. One common feature of their contributions was their rejection of a human-interests-only or ‘anthropocentric’ approach to ethics.


2013 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 385-388
Author(s):  
Lisbeth Witthøfft Nielsen ◽  
Zohar Lederman

2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Wolsing

Environmental ethics began in the 1960s with a growing awareness of coming environmental problems such as pollution and the projected shortage of resources caused by an acceleration in human’s technically based exploitation of nature. In addition to becoming an issue in public debate and in politics since the 1970s, the environmental crisis, which can be laid at the door of industrialization, calls for a more basic consideration of man’s attitude to nature. In this paper I give a short presentation of the concept of crisis in a selection of the principal classical critical philosophies of history and suggest that they all connect crisis to the oppression of man’s inner nature. I go on to sketch the idea of environmental crisis as an oppression of outer nature (the natural environment) suggesting that a new, more nuanced organic concept of nature is needed as a condition for ascribing value to life on earth as a whole, which is what most non-anthropocentric ethical theories to some extent do.


Author(s):  
Oswald J. Schmitz

This chapter examines what environmental stewardship hopes to accomplish by putting it into the context of broader anthropocentric and nonanthropocentric ethical considerations. The ethical awareness and non-economic values that humans have for nature plays an important part in shaping human attitudes and behavior: how humanity views and treats life on Earth. The field of nonanthropocentric environmental ethics emerged in response to a desire for greater humility in human engagement with nature. The chapter considers how nonanthropocentric ethics are expressed in society, citing as an example the animal rights and animal welfare movement. It also discusses environmental stewardship as an emerging ethic that is intermediate between anthropocentrism on the one hand, and ecocentrism on the other. Finally, it reflects on what will happen when humans heavily exploit or damage ecosystems.


1989 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 363-368
Author(s):  
Robin Attfield ◽  

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