2. We may define environmental ethics as the study of man's
moral obligation to preserve the environment and the natural order
of things. a) Moral Obligation - a perceived duty to perform an act
as good, or to avoid an act as evil. A recent theory called Moral
Extensionism argues that "humans have duties to natural entities,
and that the rights on which these duties are founded are based on
some intrinsically valuable characteristic of the entity". (Thomas
A. Shannon, An Introduction to Bioethics, Paulist Press, NY, 1978,
p. 153) Moral Extensionism departs from the traditional view that
environment is valuable only on account of its relation to humans.
It is thought that the lower life forms are "means" towards the
promotion of human life. On the contrary, moral extensionism
insists the environment and creatures have "meaning in and of
itself" beyond mere instrumentality. 3. b) preservation of
environmentis here taken as the final aim of environmental
philosophy. It is based o the assumed truth that man's survival is
interrelated wuth that of hos environment. c) respect for the
natural order of things points to the moral practice.Man must
submit to the moral demands of natural law and must not intervene
carelessly with the work of Nature. For example, man must "fit" his
technology to ecology. 4. Ecology 5. -Ecology comes from the greek
word "eikos", meaning, habitation or home. It refers to earth as
our home where we survive and live. -As a Science, Ecology is the
study of the interrelation of organism in an environment and of the
process linking organism and place. Environment includes all the
external forces or conditions acting on an organism or community of
organism. These conditions are climatic, chemical, and biological.
6. Climatic conditions refer to the temperature and humidity
prevailing in any geographic location. Chemical conditions refer to
the type and concentration of chemicals in soil, water and air.
Biological conditions refer to the interralation of organisms or
communities of organism. 7. Environment is a process, called
ecosystem. The global ecosystem, as explained by Barry Commoner
(May 28, 1917 September 30, 2012), is "the closed web of climatic,
chemical, and biological processes created by living things,
maintained by living things, and through the marvelous
reciprocities of biological and geochemical evolution, uniquely
essential to the support of living things". an example of an
ecosystem is the food chain of prey - predator type. biosphere
refers to global environment supportives of life. 8. "Environmental
Degradation" 9. Environmental degradation is the large scale
despoliation of earth and its sources as a result of human
activities. Animal and human populations behave similarly when they
multiply beyond the supportive capabilities of their environments.
They pollute their habitats, exhausts natural resources, succumb to
severe competition for food, and suffer strife, malnutrition,
disease and social breakdown. The rapid increase in human
population in the last 100 years has changed the global environment
in a scale comparable to a major geologic or climatic forces. 10.
Likewise, technological advancements are also mainly responsible
for the varied ecological problems threatening man's survival. 11.
"Man and Ecology" 12. From ecological point of view, man is part of
the ecosystem. He is not apart, nor above Nature, but in it. He is
rooted on his environment as much as the tree, and his mortal life
is dependent upon the ecosystem. Man has besides another dimension
which is the relatedness of the self. Paul Shepard observes:
"Individual man has his particular integrity, to be sure. Oak trees
even mountains have selves or integrities too. To our knowledge,
those forms are not troubled by seeing themselves in more than one
way, as man is. In one aspect, the self is an arrangement of
organs, feeling, and thoughts - a "me" - surrounded by a hard body
boundary: skin, clothes, and insular habits. This idea needs no
defense. 13. It is conferred to us ny the whole history of our
civilization. Its virtue is verified by our affluence. The
alternative is a self as a center of organization, constantly
drawing on and influencing the surroundings, whose skin and
behavior are soft zones contacting the world instead of excluding
it. Both views are real and their reciprocity significant. We need
them both to have a healthy social and human maturity." 14. Man is
the product of the soil reported in the book of Genesis(in the
Bible). He is part of the world, and the world is part of his body.
Like an actor on a stage, man plays a role in the equilibrium of
interdependence. Man's umbilical cord connects with the earth's
ecosystem, It is not romanticism that we refer to biosphere as
"Mother Nature". We are children of nature, "the flesh and blood"
of Mother Nature. Thus, in the mysticism of St. Francis of Assissi,
man is brother to the sun, the moon, the birds, the wolves, and the
trees. 15. "Ecological Man" 16. Ignored by the western philosophy,
man's relatedness with environment is the assumption of environment
ethics. The view is not entirely new. Abundant traces of it are
found in the consciousness of people. For instance, the Genesis
tells how God formed man out of the soil and placed him in the
garden of Eden of all kinds of trees nourished by forking rivers.
The place before the fall of man implied peace and harmony among
all living and non-living things. 17. Likewise, in the Taoist and
Confucian tradition a mythical golden age is pictured. Zaener
quotes Chuang Tzu: "Yes, in the age of perfect virtue men lived in
common with birds and beasts, and were on terms of equality with
all creatures, as forming one family; how could they know
themselves the distinction of superior man and small men. Equally
without knowledge, they did not leave (the path of) their natural
virtue; equally free from desires, they were in a state of pure
simplicity. In that state of pure simplicity, the nature of people
was what ought to be. But when the sagely men appeared, limping and
wheeling about in (the exercise of) human-heartedness, pressing
along and standing on tiptoe in the doing of righteousness, then
men universally began to be perplexed." (R.C. Zachner, The Catholic
Church and World Religions, Faith and Fact Book, Burns and 18.
Within the context of Taoism, the animism of pre- historic
Filipinos is not ignorance and superstition but an ecological
perception. That siMalakas and siMaganda emerged from bamboo is an
allegorical explanation of man's natural dependence on plants. For
Paul Shepard this is a possibility: "The elegance of such systems
and the delicacy of equilibrium are the outcome of a long evolution
of interdependence. Even society, mind and culture are parts of
that evolution. There is, between the emergence of higher primates
and flowering plants, pollinating 19. "Lost Paradise" 20. Both myth
and science point to an ecological paradise. That man has lost
sense of his kinship with nature owes to the influence of
"ambivalent culture". Thomas Merton traces this ambivalence to the
Puritan settlers who regarded it a religious duty to wage war
against nature. The Puritans regarded the wilderness as the domain
of moral wickedness, since it favored spontaneity, amounting to
"sin". The Puritans were sagely men spoken of by the Taoists. Their
attitude towards nature was inherited by the pioneers - both of
wilderness and of technology. 21. "Man and Technology" 22.
Technology is the complex technique for achieving a predetermined
result through rationalized process, using various hardware such as
machines, instruments, or robots. Our modern city is a maze of
concrete intestines where foreign bodies of cars, buses, factories
and people crawl and squeeze each other, belching and breathing-in
poisoned gas. Even our cultural values have been bastardized to
suit the convenience of modern life-styles. Where, for example,
agricultural needs binded people to land and fellowmen,
industrialization has categorized people in perpetual conflict for
23. Thank You.
