We live in one world, and the life support system – the biosphere and its associated atmosphere – is thinner than the skin of an onion. This thin but surprisingly robust biological-physical veneer over the inanimate physical core of the earth is the environment in which life as we know it today evolved and is supported. It is a veneer that was in part created by this life, which in turn depends on it for continued existence.
The biosphere supports many life forms and many species, but does not need any single one of these species to continue its overall life-giving function. Nature has evolved a robust insurance on life through the development of considerable biological redundancy at the level of overall global ecosystem function, a redundancy that is also seen at smaller spatial scales, but only variably so when one examines relationships between some individual species. This biological redundancy is expressed as the world's biological diversity.
Humans have ethical responsibilities with regards to the biosphere – otherwise known as the environment. Individuals have ethical responsibilities to sustain the life support systems of other individuals and the communities they live in. Communities and countries have ethical responsibilities not to damage the biosphere and thereby reduce the life support systems of other communities and countries.
We share the biosphere with many other species; humans are but one, albeit currently dominant, member of the global biotic community. This status raises ethical questions about our right to alter the biosphere in ways that harms the life support systems of the other species. However, “nature” – both physical and biological components thereof – is continually altering the environment in ways that change the relationships between species and causes the local or global demise of some. Is “nature” unethical in this? Are humans more or less ethical than “nature” when they cause such species loss? If humans are accelerating this process in comparison to “nature”, does “Nature” have a plan that determines an ethical rate of species loss? Would human-caused species loss be ethical if it sustained this rate?
Diseases, parasites, herbivores and predators play a vital role in regulating the populations of the organisms they prey on, and this is vital in determining the dynamic “balance of nature” (if this exists?). These biological agencies act to prevent populations from reaching levels at which they damage their own life support systems and that of other species. Is it therefore unethical for humans to reduce predation and disease in plant and animal populations? Is it ethical for humans to prevent human disease, prolong human life, practice medicine and try to prevent population reduction through conflict when such agents of mortality and population regulation have historically prevented human populations from rising to levels at which they damage the biosphere and the life support systems for humans and other species? In terms of the environment, is it ethical for society to save the lives of millions in over-populated areas from flood, drought and starvation when these problems are exacerbated by having too many people? From a human perspective it is clearly unethical to fail to do this; but what is ethical from an environmental perspective? Is it ethical for the wealthy nations to impose their view of environmental ethics on crowded developing nations? How do we balance the ethics and rights to life of the individual against the ethics and survival of the community that individual lives in, the ethics of that species, and the ethics of the other species that it is affecting?
These questions and many others pose enormous challenges to environmental ethicists. They also raise difficult questions with respect to other aspects of human ethics, and the ethics of science and technology in support of the expansion of the human population and its domination of the biosphere.
In the visual presentation accompanying this introduction, the origins of the modern environmental ethic are explored, and the question is raised about how we balance the ethical perspectives on the environment in wealthy developed nations and societies against those of crowded, poor and developing nations. The biosphere is remarkably robust – in spite of millennia of environmental alteration by human activities, it continues to function and the majority of species have survived, in spite of dire warnings to the contrary. Against this optimistic view, there are many examples in which the capacity of local ecosystems and the broader biosphere to absorb human impacts has been exceeded, species loss and degradation of ecosystem and landscape function has occurred, and the carrying capacity for humans has been reduced. Environmental ethics should clearly be concerned about questions of individual species rights, cruelty to animals and similar issues. But it must also be concerned about the ethics of continued human population growth that threatens to exceed the resilience of the biosphere, with grave potential consequences for humans and many other species. Yet other species would benefit from biospheric changes that caused the demise of the human race. Clearly, environmental ethics is very complex and exceeds even the complexities of human ethics.
These introductory notes are closed with the message from Aldo Leopold, from his essay The Land Ethic.
“ 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”
BUT
“ The evolution of a land ethic is an intellectual as well as emotional process. Conservation is paved with good intentions which prove to be futile, or even dangerous, because they are devoid of critical understanding either of the land, or of economic land-use”
We must understand the biophysical foundations for an environmental ethic if it is to serve humans in their quest for a sustainable and ethics relationship to their environment.
Hamish Kimmins
March 17 th , 2005 Vancouver, B.C.,
Canada
Notes:
Slide 1. “Pristine environments” are highly regarded in our crowded world. We create parks and wilderness areas to protect them from human disturbance. Formerly they were considered dangerous places that inhibited human development, to be tamed and mastered. Now they are protected to sustain the life support systems of certain other species, to provide for spiritual, cultural and recreational values for people in wealthy nations, or to sustain the supply of traditional values for indigenous peoples. There is a growing culture of “wildness” in societies and countries where wildness has been lost due to human domination of the biosphere.
Slide 2. Much of the modern concern over biodiversity originated in wealthy developed nations where concerns developed over the loss of species-rich tropical rain forests caused both by exploitation in support of the life styles and needs of those wealthy nations, and by population increase and unsustainable land use policies in the tropical countries.
Slide 3. There is great emotional value for humans in very large trees. Large size is frequently associated “old” and “ancient”, but the two are not well correlated. Size and beauty elicit feelings of protectiveness which may or may not result in the values being sustained. Over the long term “protection” may or may not be an ethical response to the responsibility to sustain such values.
Slide 4. Endangered species - a key issue in environmental ethics. Species extinction is frequently confused with local extirpation, which may or may not threaten the species throughout its geographical range. Loss of our evolutionary inheritance is certainly an ethical and environmental issue, but species are not necessarily sustained by conventional “protection”. Protection of endangered species generally requires maintenance of habitat, but this may require periodic habitat disturbance that causes temporary population reduction or local extirpation. Post glacial changes in species geographical distribution, often but not always associated with human activity, can be a cause of species loss, as can interactions with other non-human species, raising the question of how the ethics of extirpation by another species compares with extirpation by human activity.
Slide 5. Conversion from forest to agricultural land to feed people results in loss of habitat and local extirpation of many other species, and even species extinctions in some cases. If such extinctions and extirpations are environmentally unethical, is the human population increase and the application of science, technology and modern medicine that causes this increase ethical? But surely it is unethical not to feed people and maintain their health? Herein lies one of the many dilemmas in environmental ethics. There is much criticism by organizations in developed countries about the loss of tropical forest and associated biodiversity such as is illustrated here, much of which is relatively recent.
Slide 6. European landscapes have been dominated for many centuries and sometimes millennia by food production activities, with loss of native species and the widespread introduction of exotic species. Is this environmentally ethical? Is it unethical for the societies that depend on these agro-ecosystems to criticize the conversion from native vegetation to agro-ecosystems elsewhere in the world to feed the rapidly growing human populations there? Such rural landscapes are much loved by the societies that have lived relatively sustainably with these altered ecosystems for a very long time.
Slide 7. While humans can live sustainably in significantly altered ecosystems (e.g. forest converted to agro-ecosystems), there are limits, and there are widespread examples of where human activity has exceeded these limits. Such exceedances are unethical both in human terms and in terms of other species and the biosphere as a whole.
Slide 8. Visually and superficially similar to the environmental alteration to the level of “degradation” shown in the last slide, this pattern of logging disturbance on southern Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada is not unethical or unsustainable from an environmental point of view. This landscape has historically been subject to infrequent large scale and severe natural disturbance. Dramatic though this appears, all native species will be conserved across the landscape as long as the appropriate landscape patterns and adequate reserves of unlogged forest and small patches of old trees are maintained. Only native tree species are being used in this forest, the management of which is highly regulated. The logging here is from the early 1970's. Logging today involves smaller openings and greater retention of tree patches within openings for both visual and biodiversity reasons.
Slide 9. Ethics of the environment raises questions of the ethics of creating wilderness areas and large reserves of “old growth” for the recreational enjoyment of a subset of wealthy societies, and the ethics of not reserving these areas as human domination of the biosphere continues to increase, and threatens species that require such areas for their life support. “Wild” places are part of the cultural consciousness of some nations, and are vital for some species of animals and plants. What is the ethical balance between reserving sufficient such areas to achieve biological conservation goals, versus the ethics of sustaining the growing human population. Does environmental ethics require a radical reassessment of human populations and standards of living? And would this be ethical from a human perspective?
Slide 10. What are the environmental ethics of clearing vast areas of biologically diverse tropical forest for agriculture in poor, over-crowded countries? And what is the ethics of criticism of this by wealthy countries that have stabilized their populations after clearing most of the native forests from their land and exploiting resources from around the world to reach this point of development?
Slide 11. Do we protect the biosphere at all costs? Should we disallow traditional shifting cultivation in the name of environmental protection? Should we encourage some conversion of tropical forest to intensively-managed agro-ecosystems to take the pressure off the remaining native ecosystems? Should the management and conservation of the forests in one country be dictated by international goals to protect the biosphere, biological diversity and global climates? There are so many ethical questions.