Environmental Ethics
Establishing an environmental ethic is of utmost concern to the human
species to
better comprehend our place in the world and our potentials for
the future. In
doing so, we must extend our thinking of rights and
responsibilities. I believe
we must incorporate not only a temporal
component, but also a spatial
understanding of the world as an organic biotic
community and how consumption is
a part of the natural order. Aldo Leopold
believes that conservation ethics must
be rooted in a determination: "A thing
is right when it tends to preserve
the integrity, stability, and beauty of
the biotic community. It is wrong when
it tends otherwise." I would like to
start with Leopold's statement, and
further explore how the definitions of
integrity, stability and beauty can be
better understood given three
corollary's: 1. All organic entities must consume
to survive – it is not only
a right, but a responsibility 2. There are limited
resources to be consumed
by organic entities on the planet 3. The human species
has the ability,
through rational thought, to conserve ever-depleting resources
Leopold's
ethic attempts to extend what is of human, moral concern to include
animals,
ecosystems, and endangered species. How can this concern be expressed
in
today's society? I see one problem with this argument in that there is
little
discussion about power and influence that is inherent in current
definitions of
rights. Therefore, I will introduce the notion that organic
entities, those that
depend on the consumption of energy for survival, must
retain the right to
consume resources to survive. Notions of right and wrong
now have no standing
– it is a fact that organic entities must consume to
maintain life. I will
turn to Callicott for some discussion of limits and to
the Second Law of
Thermodynamics as a moral decree to conservation. The
resources for survival are
diverse and limited, and we must explore more
fully the components of a biotic
community as a whole to explore our moral
limits. Community components Organic
entities exist (i.e. live) in an
interdependent organic community. This
viewpoint will examine components of
the world which are necessary to maintain
organic life. Biological entities
are not the only things that require
consumption in these organic
communities: Fire consumes oxygen as well as
organic entities, the atmosphere
consumes radiation from the sun, water consumes
through the removal of
essential oxygen to those that require it, and the earth
consumes through
convection. The earth, itself, does nothing more than recycle
energy.
Inorganic earth, water and air are also methods of transportation within
the
consumption community. Temporally, to better understand
the
interconnectedness with other entities we must look at humanities
history
through the ancestry of the land. Leopold described the rings on a
fallen tree
to show where, at different points in time, it may have been
affected by other
forces of consumption. We can see this in a ring that is
charred black due to a
fire over one hundred years ago, or where romantic
lovers etched their names in
its sturdy frame. However, when we examine
things at the microscopic level, a
rich picture emerges that relates our
biological history with nature. Leopold
writes of this through the Odyssey of
"Particle X": In the flash of a
century the rock decayed, and X was pulled
out and up into a world of living
things. He helped build a flower, which
became an acorn, which fattened a deer
which fed an Indian, all in a single
year. The human sensory methods of
discovery tend to miss many relationships
between organic entities. We tend to
miss a lot of things when we are not
actually living in nature as well. The
modern market-driven consumer society
is very different from the consumer
community of the totality of organic
entities on the earth – and quite
possible less complex. We tend not only to
consume resources, but technology
allows us to build things that consume
resources just in the production process
itself. These, in turn, produce
forms of energy that can then be consumed by
human beings as a species.
Finite energy resources Up until now, I have
neglected the inorganic life
that abounds on the planet. I will now turn to the
Second Law of
Thermodynamics which states that in any closed system, entropy is
always
increasing. Organic entities require energy for survival, and entropy,
which
is a measure of the amount of energy unavailable for work during a
natural
process, is constantly increasing. That is, the more we consume, the
more waste
is produced that is not available to organic entities to survive.
Organic
entities and communities do nothing more than recycle energy
throughout the
planet – from the flower, to the wolf, to the ocean. It is our
consumption, in
relation to the community as a whole, that we must keep in
mind. Community
stability The stability of the land is crucial to maintain
the recycling of
energy for living communities. We run into problems with the
realization that
energy can take on different forms, and those types
available may not be able to
be consumed by the individual entities that
inhabit it. Reductions in the number
of species, and their interdependent
relationships, over time will result in
unstable systems which can no longer
recycle usable energy due to the lack of
entities that can consume it. The
human relevance here is that our actions,
which are currently removing entire
organic communities, will have dramatic
effects on the stability of the
organic community. Here, it is important to see
that individuals contribute
to and affect the stability of the community as a
whole. Community integrity
The integrity of the organic community is a difficult
concept to address in
an ever-changing natural world. I would like to relate it
to the spatial
component of interconnectedness between organic entities within
and between
the organic community. Here, organic entities are but a process
within the
recycling process of the earth as a whole. The individual components,
aside
from extremely damaging human events, will normally not put a dent in
the
community as a whole. The recycling processes of the community here
include
weather phenomena, natural land movements, and ocean sinks and these
have little
concern for the individual entities of the organic community. It
is the
integrity and interconnectedness of the whole that can be compromised
most
easily by human hands. Community beauty "The trend of evolution is
to
elaborate and diversify the land [sea and air] biota." Dr.
Leopold
emphasizes the diversity of the landscape and its contribution to the
beauty
that exists there. It is this component that combines the abstract and
rational
thought in the human species. I believe the saying is beauty is in
the eyes of
the beholder. This is probably the most difficult points to
discuss because of
that. I don't believe beauty can be subjected to the
objective sciences of
today, where it would just be thrown within the current
institutional power
structure. We must come to grips with our consumption
patters, in relation to
the amount of energy that is required for ourselves,
and other entities, to
exist. Callicott believed that the scope and rate of
extinction could be used as
well, by examining the rate of species
extinction, and compare it with previous
sources of information on the
subject. This diversification that Leopold
discusses can allow us to frame
beauty in an energy-consumption view. The human
species, and its endless
creation of energy consuming and transforming machines,
has found ways to
take away the rights of other organic entities to consume. We
have removed
not only energy sources for other organic entities, but have
removed the
entities altogether. Ecological Education Beyond the ethical
prowess, and
more importantly, we need to change how people think about the
environment
through education. The citizen-conservationist needs an
understanding of
wildlife ecology not only to enable him (her) to function as a
critic of
sound policy, but to enable him (her) to derive maximum enjoyment from
his
(her) contacts with the land. The jig-saw puzzle of competitions
and
cooperations which constitute the wildlife community are inherently
more
interesting than mere acquaintance with its constituent species, for the
same
reason that a newspaper is inherently more interesting than a
telephone
directory. It is only through this democratic education process
that we can
truly, as a consumer species, come together in moral
environmental thought. The
virtual realities available to us today only
provide virtual experiences.
Leopold believed experiential learning was
the only way to overcome and to do
this was to get out into nature and get
first-hand experiences. "Schools
and Universities need nearby pieces of land
on which conservation problems and
techniques can be shown, and researches
performed." The Moral call This
process of consumption and waste production
is repeated over and over until
there is no energy, usable by organic
entities, left. The human species is the
only organic entity that can
realize, through rational thought, this global
process which will result in
the end of organic life on this planet. Really,
that is why this paper is
being written! In essence, the amount of energy that
can be consumed is
finite, naturally decreasing, and only realized by the human
species. It
seems a fatalistic point of view, but in terms of human lifetimes,
the end of
usable resources may still be thousands of generations away. A
re-examination
of the primary consumption entities of today are not even
organic. They are
mechanical devices, driven by a materialistic ethic, meant to
transform
energy into types that our species can then consume. Cars consume oil,
power
plants consume coal, and our packaging consumes trees. Not to mention all
of
the conversions directly to unusable energy, such as plastics or even
the
processes of material production itself. Of course, by removing the
potential
energy base for other organic entities, this can lead to
instability in the
organic community as a whole. Therefore, we must not ask
too much of nature and
conserve the limited resources of the life giving
Earth.
Bibliography
Leopold, Aldo. 1937. Teaching wildlife
conservation in public schools.
Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of
Sciences, Arts and Letters, Vol. 30,
pp. 77-86.