Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
activity, and is supported by a number of increasingly accepted principles,
such as that the polluter should pay for cleaning up its pollution.The ethics
of stewardship, which inherently assumes that the natural and human
spheres are different (that is, there has to be a “natural” sphere for the
“human” sphere to be a steward of ), are inherent in the overhead approach,
and are in that sense not radical (even if not fully implemented).To a great
extent, the stewardship approach is also compatible with many existing the-
ological systems, in principle if not in practice, especially because, by
accepting the duality of the natural versus human world, such an approach
does not displace the role of deities.
An Earth Systems Engineering approach based on industrial ecology is a
profoundly different matter, in that human institutions are required to assert
the right—indeed, the obligation—to manage global systems, and, con-
comitantly, to make tradeoffs that heretofore have widely been regarded as
transcendent. Consider just briefly the question “How many people are you
willing to kill to save a species?” or, conversely,“How many species are you
willing to drive to extinction to save one human life?” Few people are will-
ing to answer such questions. In fact, most would view them as profoundly
offensive, in large part because they pose what many people regard as two
moral absolutes—the value of an innocent human life, and the value of a
species—against each other, and, in doing so, make them relative rather
than absolute. Choosing either answer reduces the other to a conditional
status.And yet, of course, such tradeoffs are occurring every day, in ways that
are invisible to individuals and to social and cultural institutions.
This is not surprising. Just as scientific, technological, and policy institu-
tions have not yet adjusted to an Earth increasingly engineered by humans,
neither have ethical or religious institutions. In a world of plentiful
resources, which the Industrial Revolution essentially created for the
human species, it was virtually by definition possible to have adequate
resources for both “humans” and “nature.”
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Moral systems which were
evolved under such conditions would have no need to develop the ability
to answer difficult questions about tradeoffs between, e.g., human lives and
species extinctions. In a world of plenty, both could be absolutes. It is only
in a world defined by human activity, however, that such absolutes no
longer pertain.
Industrial ecology and Earth Systems Engineering also raise another fun-
damental question that is moral, not technical, in nature. Most simply, this
may be stated as follows:“To what end are humans engineering—or should
