Environmental Ethics in the 21st Century

COMEST Interview with Rainier A. Ibana

1. What do you think is the meaning and role of Environmental
Ethics in the 21st century and what can COMEST do to promote it?

     Environmental Ethics in the 21^st Century is characterized by our awareness of being intricately connected with others.  These experiences of connectivity are articulated by 21^st Century theories that deal with the complex connections between and among the members of the natural world and our contemporary technological culture.  These theories, along with the science of ecology, can serve as dialogue partners for environmental ethicists who would like to deal with this problem. 

     The moral imperative, in terms of an environmental ethics today, is to support the regenerative capacities of nature while restraining the excessive demands of our consumerist culture. The line must be drawn also between innovations that add value and extend life from technolgies that are actually more expensive to produce than their actual added values to human living.  The tension between technological progress and nature’s carrying capacity is becoming more and more extended to the extent that the latter can no longer sustain our contemporary models of social and economic development.

     By putting the environmental agenda to the stage of global discourse, COMEST can initiate the creation of a more expansive level of human awareness wherein individual and collective actors can become conscious of their global responsibility for the many anonymous others that can be adversely or positively affected by their deeds or misdeeds, by their actions or non-actions, towards the environment.  The effects and counter-effects of human activities are shared and felt in a multiplicity of ways, like “ripples on a placid pond”, by many others that include not only humans but also animals, the quality of our oceans and the colours of the sky. Turtles die of suffocation, just to cite a popular example, when they accidentally swallow plastic bags that have been carelessly thrown away after we have asserted our hollow feelings of non-existence during our shopping sprees. 

2. Why is climate change an ethical problem and how could ethics be useful in addressing it?

     The adverse effects of climate change on human and non-human populations are irreparable.  It is very difficult for victims of natural disasters to recover from the sudden loss of loved ones, the destruction of their properties and their shattered plans for the future.  It deprives vulnerable populations of their right to live a decent life that was premised on the predictable patterns of nature in the past.  Today, we are not sure when and where the next natural disaster will strike. I grew up in a province which used to be visited by typhoons many times a year and we have learned how to cope with it.  We now seldom experience these typhoons and the ones who never experienced them before are the ones being devastated and they have not yet learned how to deal with it.

  Ethics is about lifestyles; it is derived from the word “ethos,” or way of living and dealing with the world. Only humans, moreover, have cultivated a variety of ethos. The anthropogenic origins of climate change can therefore be modified, if not reversed, if humans can have a better understanding of the consequences of their ethos on the environment.

     Furthermore, ethics is not a mere code of prohibitions of what we should not do in relation to others.  It is not a kind of blame game that merely points back at the anonymous others who might be responsible for the voracious kind of humanity that is mirrored by the current state of our natural world.  We are all implicated in this difficult situation by our actions or non-actions against nature.

     The more important aspect of environmental ethics, however, is to reflect on what we can do to regenerate the life-giving powers of “nature”, a word derived from the term natus, to give birth, to a new generation.  Our actions reveal what we have become as human beings and we can develop the more positive side of our humanity by becoming more generous and temperate towards our natural environment.

3. In 1997 UNESCO adopted a 'Declaration on the Responsibilities
of the Present Generation towards Future Generations'. Do you think the declaration is still meaningful? If so, what do we need to do to make it more noted and effective?

     Our responsibility towards future generations is mediated by the quality of life on Earth which we shall pass forward to the future in a state that is hopefully better than when we have found it.  If human progress is to make sense, it would have to mean not merely faster and more efficient technologies but a kinder and gentler world wherein people can become more secure of their lives along with their loved ones in relation to their environments. 

     It is actually very difficult to separate ourselves from our surroundings.  The most common diseases today, for example, are related to the skin and our lungs, areas of our bodies that are most exposed to our environments.  Certainly we do not want to pass on to the next generation these kinds of diseases and the environmental problems that go with it. 

     There are legal and ethical principles that have been developed in order to protect the next generation.  One of them is the so-called “intergenerational solidarity,” which was the result of a legal case filed on behalf of future generations in a successful lawsuit in our country (the Philippines) against illegal loggers. Another emerging notion is the concept of “resiliency” which tries to determine a population’s capacity to endure and adapt to environmental disasters.

     In relation to these new concepts, I believe that we should never underestimate local and indigenous wisdom in terms of their coping mechanisms to environmental problems. I suspect that some of the solutions to our global problems such as climate change are hidden from us by local and indigenous wisdom in the same manner that medical discoveries are being made today from exotic species under the seas and within the rainforests.  The aggravation of the consequences of natural disasters are already sketched from the terrain and contours of local contexts.

     I also trust that the new sciences of complexity and ecology can develop new technologies on the global scale that could address climate change.  But these highly technological innovations are relatively more expensive than the ones being developed “from the ground.” In the Asia-pacific region, small- scale technologies are being invented and are often published in daily newspapers. The most recent Ramon Magsaysay Awards were given to local innovations that harness indigenous energy resources derived from within local communities that are also being consumed by the local people themselves.

     Perhaps we can develop more of these principles and disseminate the success stories of local technologies that could protect and advance the cause of environmentalism for the sake of the next generation instead of merely blaming and extracting punishments for the deeds or misdeeds of our predecessors.  Otherwise, the future generation will also blame us for what we have done or not done towards the environment.