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establish the effects of actions at the systemic level which, in practice, we
do not possess.
I suggest that a more effective ethical position would be based around
a clear statement of basic obligations towards ecosystems and supported
by principles comprising a virtue ethic for decision-making. The school
of virtue ethics has been ignored largely as a route for developing environ-
mental ethics.
130
However, its concern with cultivating behaviours whose
practice are more likely than not to result in good outcomes for humanity
offers a way forward in circumstances where it is dif
cult to identify what
the consequences of our activities may be, and where we do not under-
stand ecosystems suf
ciently to go beyond broad statements of duty as to
how we should act towards them.
131
A set of guiding principles for
political decision-making that re
ects the value of ecosystem functionality
for human well-being seems more likely to yield an effective way forward
than reliance on consequentialist or deontological solutions alone.
The main duty that
ows from values held in ecological processes,
properties and resilience is that we should control our activities with
the aim of reducing their erosive effects on resilience and the systemic
processes and properties that contribute to and maintain it. This duty
applies both to the macro-level of determining what activities we should
pursue and the micro-level of deciding whether plans, programmes and
proposals for development and resource exploitation should be endorsed.
It should provide, as argued in
Chapter 3
, the primary objective for a legal
system for ecological protection.
A second duty is that we should make every effort to increase our
knowledge and understanding of ecosystems so that we are better able
to observe the primary duty of maintaining ecosystem health. Whilst
acquiring suf
cient knowledge to know exactly how ecosystems will evolve
is an unattainable goal, we can at least attempt to reduce uncertainty over
the ecological impacts of our activities by seeking to move beyond what
Simon Levin describes as
our shocking ignorance of many of the most
fundamental features of the world around us
'
.
132
The knowledge-gathering
I envisage here is distinct from the periodic environmental assessment of
the impacts that development proposals may have to aid decision-makers
'
130
P. Carfaro,
in
R. J. Goldstein (ed.) Environmental Ethics and Law (Aldershot:Ashgate,2004),p.23.
131
Curry,
'
Thoreau, Leopold, and Carson: Toward an Environmental Virtue Ethics
'
'
Ecological Ethics
'
,pp.45
-
51.
132
S. A. Levin, Fragile Dominion: Complexity and the Commons (Cambridge, MA: Helix
Books, 1999), pp. 198
-
9.
