Environmental Ethics: I

I will start my meditations with an attempt to summarize what has been said time and again about the origins of our current attitude toward nature. That which is to say that nature and its resources are by in large their for our use, and as Don Marietta points out in his book For People and The Planet for us to use the resources provided man first assumes we must conquer nature. Which may be the assumed view, but I do not think we must conquer nature to use its resources (I think we must use natural resources to live) we just must work with nature, more on those thought will come later.

Lynn White did a great job of tracing this idea of man being above nature and conquering nature back to the book Genisis in the Bible. It is the story of creation when God tells Adam that he has created all the fish in the sea and the animals on the land for Adam to name and conquer. White suggests that this passage (which I have very roughly summarized) has God telling us that we are somehow above animals and that it is our duty to rein over them.

This creates many questions in my mind. I'm not religious, but I am going to have to defend the Bible here. Lynn simply misinterpretted what Genisis is saying. God does not want us to harm nature by using it, instead he wants us to be more of a steward, to look after the animals and plants around us. I also wonder about this assessment because, now, we all know that animals came before us along the evolutionary chain. So I think there is too much emphasis put on this passage.

What I am trying to say is that, it is not the Bible, it is the way in which people have interpretted the Bible. The same way people have been going to war for centuries in the name of God or Allah or whatever religion they might deem favorable. It is so interesting how men through the ages have beleived that some god "is on our side." If there is any god, I doubt he gives a hoot about who wins a war, there seem to be bigger problems in the universe.

One thing is for certain, humans have beleived that they are somehow apart-from-nature for far too long. This is where I wish to start my meditating on the subject. I am not concerned with why or how this idea of man-apart-from-nature came from, dwelling on the past is no way to move forward. Instead we must assume that we have not been a part of this anthropocentric view that has dominated our intellect in the past.

We have to avoid this because there have certainly been other views throughout history as well. For whatever reason, the apart from nature view has gained the most acceptance. Consider the societies of North America before the Europeans settles. Many Native American tribes had a very deep respect for nature as a part of their livelihood. We can also look at ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean cultures (as Marietta points out) that had mostly nature centered paganist religions. So it seems a futile effort to try to find the source of why things are the way they are, they just are and something needs to be done.

We must try to see ourselves as a part of nature, which is more of an intricate system of give and take, we are biologically 98% identical to an ape - why do we think ther is any reason we should conquer that ape and its inhabitat?

I have class soon, but more is to come.
-the colonel