Environmental Ethics as regulator for the systems of Man and Environment. A human-ecologic and system approach

Abstract

Effective counterregulation for destabilized regional and global ecosystems and improvement of the interaction between man and his environment is impossible without a change of attitudes, values and lifestyle via a new or revived nature-directed ethic. Our existing ethic is purely social, much reduced and mainly effective within our own group. By 1933 the American ecologist Leopold had pointed out that we also need an “ethic of the land” to supplement our present social and political (democratic) ethics and that unless it is developed, progress from the existing man-directed ethics would also be lost.

The key concept, comprising nature and man is the “ecosystem”. Ethics directed towards nature and man are essential for human survival and part of the basic cultural outfit of mankind, as the ecosystems supporting man can only be sustained if utilization of resources and civilization-induced changes are sensible, sparing, considerate and responsible, not egoistic (anthropocentric, eurocentric), greedy, exploitative and short­sightedly stupid. An integrative, less domineering, contented more personal approach to nature may lead also to “environmental etiquette”, the new decent way to behave. Although distance from a nature, civilization, our education and manipulation by science and economy have conditioned our minds for efficient functioning within this civilization, rudiments of environmental ethics have survived and are transmitted in child education, folk customs and fairy tales. Natural systems have become destabilized particularly in the course of the industrial and economic revolution and its acceleration in the post-war period. Remedies connected with changes of mind must be civilized, totally systemic and immediate, because the critical phase, in which effective counterregulation is no longer possible is imminent. Intellectual insight as a base for such curative intervention is not sufficient, it must be tied to a strong emotional engagement to become effective, because the social, economic and political resistance to such changes is great. We should not wait for philosophers to present the new environmental ethics, its principles and commandments or golden rule, or till these have developed through spontaneous generation in a “greener Zeitgeist”, but work on it systematically along several paths:

• a) Cultural retrospection and restoration of the “cultural heritage” (ethno-historical approach).

• b) Study of the religions, cosmology and environmental ethics of the “primitive peoples” of the world and adaption and transfer of such cultural elements into our thinking (global, anthropological approach).

• c) Evaluation of systems of philosophy, particularly integrative, holistic nature philo­sophy (philosophical approach) and

• d) deduction of an ethic at system and principles from the environmental and human ecological sciences particularly from ecology (concept of the ecosystem) human ecology and from cybernetics as the general science of systems.

These paths should converge. Such ethics must be conceived for all levels of human orga­nization: individual, social and political, to become effective as the main regulator. The political level of ethics and regulation is particularly important and problematic. Unless effective regulation can be achieved here at the national and international level there will be violence from the people as in former social and political regulation. Violence might then be considered as form of regulation under extreme conditions of danger and hardly unethical. It can however be avoided by effective political regulation in time. Even so insoluble conflicts between the established social ethics which is man-centered and concerned with present conditions and goals and environmental ethics at a higher systemic level of man and nature, concerned with longterm stability and sustainability, which is new or being revived must be expected. Under no conditions however can environmental ethics be purely based on environmental science or biology. It must be also humane and human ecological in the widest sense, that is dualistic.