Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Box 2.1
Feeding people versus saving nature?
The renowned American ecocentric philosopher Holmes Rolston III (1996, 2011) has
been both highly influential and highly controversial. His approach to environmental
ethics has led him to ask some direct and difficult questions, and offer answers that
many within and outside of the environmental movement find discomforting. He asks
whether we should save nature if it means that people will go hungry. If we always
put people first, are we prepared to sacrifice every other creature? Are we prepared
to see a world without rhinos? As the human population expands pressure on the
land, whether it is land protected in conservation areas rich in biodiversity, or sensitively
worked by indigenous peoples, or simply earmarked for 'development', will increase.
Do human rights trump everything else? Should they? Environmental policy ought
to and already does regulate human behaviour and there are many designated
conservation areas in the world looking after cultural, ecological, scientific, historical,
economic, aesthetic and religious values. Holmes Rolston III believes that every person
living is already told, and knows, that he or she cannot develop some areas. They
need not starve but they need and ought not to do so by sacrificing nature, and this
environmental ethic needs to be communicated more fully, more effectively and
more forcefully. Individuals too often look to only their immediate local concerns
and interests. They deal with the pressures of the moment and do not necessarily
see ahead or operate on intelligent scales that require the capacity to look deeper
into the future. So . . .
Ought we to feed people first, and save nature last? We never face so simple
a question. The practical question is more complex. If persons widely demonstrate
that they value many other worthwhile things over feeding the hungry (Christmas
gifts, college educations, symphony concerts), and if developed countries, to
protect what they value, post national boundaries across which the poor may
not pass (immigration laws), and if there is unequal and unjust distribution of
wealth, and if just redistribution to alleviate poverty is refused, and if charitable
redistribution of justified unequal distribution of wealth is refused, and if one fifth
of the world continues to consume four fifths of the production of goods and
four fifths consumes one fifth, and if escalating birthrates continue so that there
are no real gains in alleviating poverty, only larger numbers of poor in the next
generation, and if low productivity on domesticated lands continues, and if the
natural lands to be sacrificed are likely to be low in productivity, and if significant
natural values are at stake, including extinctions of species, then one ought not
always to feed people first, but rather one ought sometimes to save nature.
(Rolston III, 1996: 265)
Saving nature is not naive. It can deepen our understanding of our place in and
our duties to the world. Ethics is expanding so that what counts is not just what
society does to slaves, minorities, women, children, the handicapped or future
generations but to the Earth's flora, fauna, ecosystems and landscapes.
