Cornvallis (US):We should be prepared to face tough ethical dilemmas. Environmental destruction can cause some complicated conundrums.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2020 novel The Ministry for the Future fictitiously depicts how the world might navigate the coming climate crisis and change direction. Robinson’s novel depicts how the world will respond to the growing biodiversity crisis by making drastic economic and political changes, as well as committing to a Half Earth plan to combat it.
The Half Earth concept is a borrowed idea from real life, most notably by E.O. Wilson, a biologist. Wilson. This is the idea that in order to save 80 percent Earth’s species, we must protect at least one-half of the Earth. Wilson said, “We can only save the vast diversity of life-forms it supports by committing half of its surface to nature.”
Half Earth was a huge success in The Ministry for the Future. It was an integrated park and corridor system that included and supported the local indigenous population. They were either park keepers or just local residents.
The Half Earth proposal has been criticized in the real world. Judith Schleicher and her colleagues write in Nature Sustainability that, while the proposal is ambiguous as to the exact locations and forms of the new protected areas, they discovered that more than one billion people live in areas that would be protected if the Half Earth proposal were applied to all ecoregions.
56 years ago, Mizoram declared independence.
The Half Earth concept seems like it pits two commitments to justice against each other. Half Earth is driven by a commitment for restorative justice (we are responsible for the biodiversity crisis so we must fix it), but also raises questions regarding distributive justice which need to be considered and analyzed. How are harms and benefits distributed in Half Earth?
Humanity’s failure to combat climate change and biodiversity declines raises questions of distributive and restorative justice. Half Earth is a classic dilemma. Half Earth is likely to cause harm. Failure to protect 80 per cent of the Earth’s biodiversity will also lead to harm.
Strategy and the speed of roll-out could mitigate some of the harms of Half Earth. However, we must learn to accept this fact and get better at navigating such dilemmas.
The future will be a place where win-wins are unlikely to be as common, if they are not outright impossible. We are facing a future in which our past failures will cause great harm. Recognizing that reality and finding ways through the moral minefield is perhaps one of the hardest and most important tasks for the future.
This dilemma can also be understood to reflect a difference in opinion on moral inclusion. If the world is seen through a human-centred lens, in which the preservation of human lives is paramount, then the disruption to one billion human lives to implement Half Earth is morally unacceptable. A non-anthropocentrist, however, believes that humans are not the only ones who matter. Half Earth might then seem like a moral obligation.
While it seems that the dominant Western culture is strongly associated with a loss in biodiversity, humans can also be despoilers and agents of biodiversity destruction. There is sometimes a positive correlation between biodiversity and human activity. The enhancement of biodiversity in some Indigenous-managed areas has been well documented.
The most important issue is that the Half Earth proposal fails address the true root causes of our environmental problems. These are philosophical. The Western cultures relationship with nature is broken because we were convinced to turn away from our ancestors animist beliefs and instead view nature as an inanimate- goods-and-services-producing-machine.
Since the Renaissance, if not before the origins of Christianity, the West has considered itself to be distinct from the rest of the world and superior. This view is woven into every institution: religious, educational and medical, political or scientific, and so forth.
Biodiversity loss, such as climate change, massive wildfires, and so forth, is a result of our fundamental assumptions about the world, and our place in it. Aldo Leopold, an American conservationist, noted over 70 years ago that we abuse land because it is a commodity that belongs to us. If we view land as a part of a larger community, we can begin to treat it with love.
The history of conservation is littered by grand schemes. These are often simple ideas that require quick implementation. They promise to fix past wrongs and make the future brighter. These schemes are always about tradeoffs. There are winners and losers in tradeoffs. However, maintaining current practices requires tradeoffs. As ecologist Carl SafinaClearly writes.
The most counter-functional thought in the climate problem is that solving it will require sacrifice. As though losing polar bears and penguins, or coral reefs, or thousands of other living companions isn’t sacrifice. As though seawater flooding and the displacement of hundreds and millions of coastal people isn’t a sacrifice. However, we think we don’t want to sacrifice. We are sacrificing money, sacrificing something permanent, and prolonging what is small, temporary and harmful.
Were we willing sacrifice animals, peace, children, and money to maintain wastefulness?
We are now faced with the decision to either philosophically and ethically rethink ourselves or cause great harms along our path to our inevitable demise. Grand scheme proposals that do not reflect a basic ethical expansion are not able to address the root causes of our environmental problems. Instead, they lull us into believing that we can solve our environmental problems by simply changing our core values. (360info.org)
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