Essay on Environmental Ethics
Healthy environment is a huge economic, aesthetic and ethical value. To preserve a healthy environment, means to take care of a good state of all its components: ecosystems, communities, species and genetic diversity. Environmental ethics is a new vigorously developing direction in philosophy that reflects the ethical value of nature in the world. Protection and maintenance of biological diversity in the natural environment is a fundamental and priority aspect of environmental policy. Thus, I’m going to tell about my personal environmental ethics in the body of this essay.
First of all I’m going to mention that I love nature and animals, I believe that everything around us is alive and the main mission of every person is to take care of environment, because people have a responsibility to future generations about existed conditions of life at our planet. From a strictly ethical point of view, if we are depleting Earth’s natural resources and cause the extinction of species, then future generations will have to pay for this in a price of lower level and quality of life. Therefore, modern society should implement into use the natural resources-saving mode, avoiding the destruction of species and communities. We can imagine that our generation lends Earth for future generations, and when our children get it back from us they should find it in good conditions.
Today, all thinking people of our planet feel and understand that we are going to meet the ecological and technological apocalypse, continuing contemporary existence in a way of expensive technological civilization. The main signs of impending disaster are the destruction of the biosphere, chemical poisoning of man and nature, and the degradation of ‘natural’ rights. Environmental ethics evaluates human actions in terms of ecosystem benefits. Ecosystem assessment seems to be more complex cognitive process than the establishment of ethical judgments in the human sphere. In environmental ethics it is important to consider not only the direct result of human action, but ‘the results of these findings.’ It is painful to understand that a human doesn’t even think about the tree, grass, stone – he just uses all of them for own purposes. I believe that the nature has its own inner life, and moreover, the nature is able to enter into a relationship with a man and respond to his demonstration of feelings, emotions, and anxieties. Nowadays people have a necessity to open their hearts and minds to the world of nature; society should begin to learn to feel it, learn to interact harmoniously with it, if not with an aim to preserve nature, but with an aim to take care of self, to extend the days of Homo sapiens’ existence on Earth.
Describing my personal ethics it is also necessary to mention that my environmental ethics does not tell me what to do, it does not indicate that one concrete solution is the only true, but it helps me to preserve the environment and control my activity, doing it less harmful to the environment. It is impossible to disagree with the statement that environmental ethics becomes possible only when the person realizes intrinsic value of natural phenomena and formulates the relevant obligations in relation to them.
Thus, taking everything into consideration, we should understand that the nature is alive and it demands the love, kindness, trust, compassion, and help from the person. I strongly believe that every person should give the nature all his/her spiritual wealth, because this ‘wealth’ is ‘invested’ in him/her by the nature during the evolution of the last. In other words, modern man has to let through self (through the prism of the ‘human’ understanding) the problem of the nature. We should clearly realize that Homo sapiens has to changed the role of the conqueror of the nature on the part of its ordinary member and citizen, and only this position will help to preserve our environment for future generations.
