Implications of the Biocultural Ethic for Earth Stewardship - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 130

100

World Africa

Asia Europe

Latin America and the Caribbean Oceania

75

50

25

0

Fig. 9.3 Relative percentages of urban populations in Africa, Asia, Europe, North- and South-
America, Oceania, and the world since 1950, including estimated percentages until 2050 (Data
from Heilig (2012))

In summary, on the one hand, to conserve and have access to a habitat is the
condition of possibility of exercising the role of steward of the land, or Earth.
On the other hand, it is not ethically acceptable to accumulate territory and not
properly administer the land to the interest of the community of co-inhabitants.
It is important to understand that the habitat includes not only its biophysical
dimension (the biosphere at a global scale, sensu Vernadsky; see Huggett 1999 ),
but also its cultural and symbolic-linguistic dimensions (the logosphere at a
global scale, sensu Krauss 2007 ), and its socio-political, institutional, and tech-
nical dimensions (the technosphere, sensu Naveh and Lieberman 1990 ).
Changes in one dimension imply changes in the other dimensions (see Fig. 9.1 ).
The concentration of wealth and ownership of the habitats generates a replace-
ment of very diverse life habits and communities of co-inhabitants by a few
plutonomic, consumerist habits involving the well-being of a minor fraction of
the co-inhabitants. This process leads to a non-sustainable and unjust process of
biocultural homogenization, which oppresses the majority of human and other-
than-human co-inhabitants (Rozzi 2013 ). Fortunately, given that history is not
linear, but instead it is dynamic and complex, global society is not condemned
to continue its path towards biocultural homogenization. Today, a greater preci-