Environmental ethics of the future

Abstract

In future we shall have to enrich our impoverished and endangered world by substituting our claims on pleasure, comfort and power with a claim for responsibility and stewardship. By doing this we ought to transform nature from being the refuse-heap of technology into a breath of culture. The world was created for man to live on it and not to be mutilated and reduced to irredeemable chaos. As a criterion for our association with nature we must remember that everything that we are technologically capable of, is not necessarily morally desirable. We should not live and work at the expense of our environment but for the benefit of the environment. The tradition of man's dominion over nature should be replaced by a tradition of stewardship. This new approach to environmental ethics must constitute an inalienable part of a multi-disciplinary approach.