Abstract
The biocultural ethic affirms the vital value of the links that have coevolved between specific life habits, habitats, and communities of co-in-habitants (“3Hs”). The conservation of habitats and access to them by communities of co-inhabitants is the condition of possibility for the continuity of their life; it becomes an ethical imperative that should be incorporated into development policies as a matter of eco-social justice. The conceptual framework of the biocultural ethic recognizes that there are numerous communities (inhabiting cities, rural, or remote areas) with cultural traditions that have ethical values centered in life, sustainable practices, and low environmental impact. It also recognizes agents that have values centered on short-term profit, non-sustainable practices, and disproportionately high environmental impact. Therefore, it would be technically and ethically right to define and enforce differential responsibilities among social groups, corporations, and nations that are contributing to the negative socio-environmental impacts that we face today. We have now reached a state of “plutonomy” that is dividing the world into two blocs: the wealthy 1 % of the world’s population that owns 50 % of the world’s wealth, and “the rest.” To achieve Earth stewardship, this trend needs to be overcome by (i) changing the current regime of plutocracy towards one of more participatory democracy that ceases to be indifferent to the well-being of the majority of human and other-than-human living beings, (ii) reorienting the current habits of plutonomy, and its associated consumerism and land-grabbing practices, towards habits of stewardship, and (iii) broadening the prevailing perspective of ecosystem services toward an ethical concept of sustainable co-inhabitation. By more precisely identifying the diversity of Earth stewards, their languages, values, cultures, and practices in heterogeneous habitats of the planet, as well as the specific agents that are mostly responsible for current socio-environmental problems, the biocultural ethic can significantly contribute to orient clearer collaborative and supportive ways for a responsible and inter-cultural Earth stewardship.
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Notes
- 1.
For example, in March 2008, the Brazilian House of Representatives passed a bill to change the law that governs forests. This change in legislation that could undermine authorities’ power to halt deforestation was passed despite the established scientific facts that deforestation causes 15 % of global greenhouse gas emissions, and 75 % of Brazil’s (Tollefson 2011).
- 2.
My conclusion concurs with Barry Commoner’s concept of “ecodemocracy,” which demands new social obligations to guide the course of both environmental improvement and economic development through democratic governance and make decisions that today are normally made on purely private economic grounds, such as profit maximization, by corporate managers. Commoner (1990) emphasized that the environment (whether local or planetary) is a sovereign social responsibility that takes precedence over the private interest in exploiting it.
- 3.
A similar figure is provided by Credit Suisse (2013), which reports a global wealth of $240.8 trillion. Share of wealth for the richest 1 % is 46 % (amounting to $110 trillion), and for the bottom half of the population is 0.71 % (amounting to $1.7 trillion). The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF, Ortiz and Cummins 2011, p. 12), and the United Nations University – World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER, Davies et al. 2007), offer complementary analyses whose global percentages are similar regarding wealth gaps at global scale.
- 4.
A legal person is a subject of rights and obligations that exists, not as an individual but as an institution that is created by one or more individuals to fulfil a social objective, which may be for profit or not for profit. Hence, along with individual people there are also legal persons which are entities that the law accords and recognizes as having legal personality and, consequently, the ability to act as legal persons – that is, the capacity to acquire and to hold real estate of all kinds, to incur obligations and to engage in legal actions. In the case of the United States of America, corporate personhood is a legal concept in which a corporation may be recognized as an individual in the eyes of the law. This doctrine forms the basis for legal recognition that corporations, as groups of people, may hold and exercise certain rights under the common law and the U.S. Constitution. For example, corporations may contract with other parties and sue or be sued in court in the same way as natural persons or unincorporated associations of persons. Richard Watson (1992) concisely discusses the historical origin of corporate persons and the legal and moral implications for environmental ethics. He criticizes that: “Corporations are not responsible moral agents. They cannot reciprocate. They can have no primary rights because they cannot fulfill any duties. It is suspected that the concept of legal personhood for corporations is a device to allow actually responsible persons to escape punishment” (Watson 1992, p. 27).
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Acknowledgments
This chapter benefited from discussions at the Departamento Ecumenénico de Investigaciones (San José, Costa Rica), especially with Roy H. May Jr., and Francisca Massardo. I thank Irene Klaver, Kelli P. Moses, Eugene C. Hargrove, and Shaun Russell for their constructive comments on the manuscript, and Paula Viano and Paola Vezzani for their artistic help in the preparation of Fig. 9.1. The National Science Foundation (Project SES-10581630), and the grants PO5-002 ICM and PFB-23 CONICYT awarded to the Institute of Ecology and Biodiversity, Chile, provided valuable support.
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Rozzi, R. (2015). Implications of the Biocultural Ethic for Earth Stewardship. In: Rozzi, R., et al. Earth Stewardship. Ecology and Ethics, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-12133-8_9
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