Author: Vacirca Villar, Carlos Bruno
Country: Argentina.
Address: Silveyra 4181 Villa Nueva, Guaymalln, Mendoza,
Argentina
ZIP code: 5521
E-mail: [email protected]: Rethinking mankinds ecological
side and environmental ethicsRethinking mankinds ecological side
and environmental ethicsMany published studies that address
socio-environmental issues emphasize the notion that human beings
must make use of an inherently rational and sensible attitude,
along with an acute and severe ethical posture, for the purpose of
improving and fundamentally altering the relation between humankind
and nature and to soften the unavoidable impact on the economy for
the generations to come.
I consider that this is an erroneous and counterproductive
approach the matter. Since the Fordism age (1930-50), industrial
society and capital accumulation have turned mankind into a
planetary, geological force, able to alter and modify the
biosphere, including also the biogeochemical cycles and means of
survival through which continued life is made possible.In
considering human beings as a planetary geological force, as an
expansive shockwave having repercussion on all aspects of life and
the Earth itself, I suggest that humankind should not be asked to
take moral responsibility for the ecological crisis. This is due to
the fact that geological agents do not have any ethical side at
all, regardless if they act with an apparently violent and
unpredictable demeanor. Moreover, this statement makes us think
carefully about the whole issue, taking into account the
possibility that the ecological crisis would be a process without a
subject in charge of.Bearing in mind the relation between culture
and power and its effects on modifying or changing the future might
show us the way to understand and try to reweigh the prevailing
socio-environmental dilemma. What does the word future really mean?
The future is a social construct per se, the summation of prospects
of social type. But the future, the time that is about to come, is
more than just a conceptual reconstruction corresponding to the
establishment of the historical relations between culture, the set
of knowledge, beliefs and behavior patterns of a social group,
including material means and power, but is also intimately related
to the survival, which emerged and developed long before the first
hominids, and is present in all of living beings within the nature
world.In this way, considering our future as aspirational is
somewhat ridiculous. I dare myself to conceive of the future as a
philosophical time involving two contradictory terms that are often
the sole representation of it: utopia and dystopia. Eternally
oxymoronic, it is a kind of an ineluctable remnant, full of guilt
that uncovers the true nature of human nature. Our greatest
strength is itself our lethal weakness; we are our own worst enemy.
The source of the difficulty lies in the fact that what can be done
by us is not intrinsically morally justifiable, on account of
the
overwhelming and unstoppable global geological might we have
become.Only humankind has created and developed the techno-science
capabilities of wiping out our own species, as well as all the
other classes and varieties of higher animals. We, who claim to
characteristically possess an extremely rational behavior, are not
allowed to even have an ecological side; mankind must be
recategorized as an natural agent of the Earth who cannot have the
chance of build up an ecological way of thinking. It would appear
that the most important thing currently in at stake in this
critical discussion about the environment is not the continuity of
life on the globe, but the survival of the human species and its
possibility for cultural attainment, that the only thing that human
should aspire for the future is obtaining more means of production
and thus a lower cost at which to gain more money and power:
humankinds everlasting and most faithful motivation. To conclude,
it would then be appropriate to quote some of Thomas Hobbes humble
words, who once said: man is the wolf of man.
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