Environmental Philosophy and Ethics

Our only home is falling apart. The world we live in is rapidly becoming another landfill for all our wastes and the human population is not doing anything as a whole to prevent these problems from becoming too extreme to the point of no return. Only recently, have we begun to focus on our environment and attempting to clean our mess for our own survival and those of future generations. It is too late to prevent climate change from taking a toll on our society as seen with increased natural disasters, rising sea levels, and the magnitude of extinction just within the past decade. However, it not too late to reduce or even inhibit the problem entirely to prevent this from getting worse. As an individual, I can do my part in showing care for the environment and my own well-being. My worldview is holistic and ecocentric as it is heavily influenced by my career in the sciences specifically in engineering and astronomy. My ethics are also influenced by my career path by believing in theories like the precautionary principle but also through my own experiences affecting who I am as a person thus adopting the need to fight for racial equality. As for practices, I am an ethical omnivore, take care of the physical environment I live in and attempt to inform myself before making purchases of certain products.

Worldview

A worldview is a certain philosophy of life or way we conceive the world from our perspective. Humans have a specific place in the world and each person decides how they belong in the world. To me, I see the world more in an experimental or logical way. Something happens because of something else. There is a cause for every effect. I feel most appealed to postmodern science specifically in the ideas of chaos and instability in the environment. According to Ilya Prigogine, “instability, irreversibility, fluctuation, and amplification are found in every human activity” (Merchant 406). This type of approach differs from the mechanistic approach by seeing everything as in chaos and changing. We shift from looking at things as parts of a whole but instead as fully holistic. There are no parts at all. As stated by Fritjof Capra “the new paradigm may be called a holistic, or an ecological, worldview” (Merchant 366). Many people are stuck thinking of the world as mechanistic and just a group of building blocks and thus struggle to see the postmodern worldview as a network. Capra talks about this “shift from building to network as a metaphor of knowledge” (Merchant 368) which most people would connect to something like a building that made from multiple building blocks and a solid foundation, metaphorically like physics is to the rest of the sciences. This shift to holistic and the change in metaphor to net or web is highly similar to that of Indra’s Jewel.

Indra’s Jewel is the point of Deep Ecology that gives a sense of interconnectedness. Our vision of reality can be structured like a holographic view of the universe so that a jewel can be placed at every node of the net while reflecting the other jewels as well (Merchant 336). The Gaia hypothesis, introduced by James Lovelock suggests that “the biosphere may be more than just the complete range of all living things within their natural habitat of soil, sea, and air” (Callicott 39). The Earth is seen as an organic whole and much greater than the sum of its parts.

Edward Lorenz similarly states that weather patterns are irregular and thus unpredictable (399). Lorenz’s thesis states that any small change or disturbance can cause massive effects in certain events around the world. This type of butterfly effect as it is called tells us that our environmental actions, no matter how small, can add up or even appear later down the line as the perpetrators to a climate disaster. An example of this is, for example, buying a six-pack of soda and tossing out the plastic rings to keep the pack together. We might just see it and throw it out and completely forget about it. Before we know it, it’s stuck around a bird or fish in the ocean. One of the environmental problems presentations in my section talked about plastic waste in the ocean and how sea nets are one the most abundant in the ocean. People are dissociated from what happens to garbage or waste once it’s thrown out. This is an example of how the butterfly effect can cause damages to other species down the line without us noticing.

Ethic

An ethic is a set of moral principles that a person follows and consults when forming a decision. Ethics are used by most people to define what is right and wrong and to understand their morality. My ethics are mainly due to my exposure and love of science.

One ethic that I see myself using in the future is the precautionary principle. The precautionary principle defines actions that should be taken if issues are considered uncertain. This ethic allows people to justify their decisions in situations where there is a potential harm to the public. As a scientist, my job is to provide information obtained from research in order to let the public know about the world around them. However, the main use of the precautionary principle is to give caution in advance in case of any potential harm and creating a form of cost-benefit analysis. This does seem to slightly conflict with the utilitarianist doctrine belief in that actions are right only if they benefit or are useful for the majority of people. Of course, this does take into account the interests of others in creating a scope of possible outcomes and weighing the positives and negatives of an outcome, however, this does not take into account the effects that the greater outcome creates. For a utilitarian, the sole factor that allows them to make a decision is just the net gain of happiness for a specific group.

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Having cars and food ready for us within a few minutes seems like a utopian idea come to life but it does not take into account the effect this has on animals or other beings. Similar to anthropocentrism, only humankind is taken into account in these decisions despite the 8.7 million species we share the Earth with. Why does it have to solely be the job and consciousness of a single one of those organisms to make the choice that affects them all? This leads to thinking about natural order just like we discussed in class in “Should Trees Have Standing” where humans think that we are the only group with mind and reason and thus are the only ones capable and with enough intellect to make decisions for the rest of the organisms on this planet. Coming back to the precautionary principle, as a researcher, I need to keep in mind what my research could end up developing into. The double-slit experiment and research into general relativity completely overturned the mechanistic worldview set by Newtonian Mechanics and created a postmodern view of the world through quantum mechanics and general relativity. My own research will most likely never reach the extent, influence, or paradigm shifts that were created but I always need to keep in mind that whatever I publish could be used as evidence for or against my own personal beliefs.

I believe in advocating for racial equality because everyone has the right to knowledge and safety when it comes to the climate crisis. A large number of people, specifically those in low-income communities, are subject to environmental injustices from the upper class with examples being electronic waste being sent to foreign countries and factory farms dumping the animal’s feces in giant pools that leak into the soil leading to unhealthy air and water quality. A majority of these people are unable to move because of their economic struggles or are dissociated with what is even happening in their environment due to not having a proper education. Near my hometown, there is a landfill and furnace constantly burning waste. It’s gotten to the point where my high school is able to see it and even smell it from a distance. Our current institutions are not giving equal opportunity to all races. As stated by Rosemary Radford Ruether, “the gap between rich and poor has steadily grown, with some 85 percent of the wealth of the world in the hands of some 20 percent of the world’s population, much of that concentrated in the top 1 percent” (Merchant 100). Poor communities are usually the most affected and thus when I’m older, I want to offer my community at-home ways to escape this injustice through increased funding in education, scholarships, and most importantly, the knowledge of the climate crisis and the effect of capitalism on communities that we live in.

Prescriptions about my ethic are incorporated into my career path. I used to only be worried about the end of the world from a solar supernova however that changed once I became aware of the world’s environmental decline. As a mechanical engineer, we produce a lot of waste in the form of chemicals byproducts and metals from projects or prototyping. Having sustainable methods to reduce waste in the workplace is ideal. Engineers, in general, should always have the environment in mind and see how our inventions could affect people and the world. A great call to attention is how our engineering community is now focusing and taking into account the environmental impact of what we do and in response, our products are more aware of their effects. For example, the Hyperloop between Los Angeles and San Francisco was going to be underground but due to concern of metals contaminating water systems, the design was changed to now be above ground. Other measures such as building the transport tubes several feet above the ground were thought of by taking potential wildlife disruption into account. Engineers are now creating their own specific ethics when it comes to designing and manufacturing products themselves, which I believe is a great step in the right direction for our community.

To this day, I think of the lifeboat ethic to an extent due to a vast majority of people in power being against climate change and or not doing much to propose a solution, let alone approve it. The lifeboat ethic, as stated by Barry Commoner, “is to withhold from the people of developing countries… far too gone or too unworthy to be saved” (Merchant 125). In this example, the lifeboat ethic was used to talk about third world countries that are too far lost by their exploitation or corruptness that it’s too late to save them. However, this ethic can be applied in a similar aspect to other ideas as well. I conduct research with NASA in order to find the origin of the universe and asteroids approaching our solar system. To an extent, my research also has a focus on finding new inhabitable planets or life outside our sphere. By continuing my research, I am, to an extent, contributing to the lifeboat ethic as well because if life on another planet is seen as possible, society will end up gaining a new worldview in that science is so advance that we are able to throw out our whole planet since life on another planet is possible.

As stated in lecture, an Ecocentric worldview recognizes the intrinsic value in ecosystems and the processes that connect these processes (Worthy). What I like about this ethic is that it offers a deep analysis of the malignant impacts that humans are creating on the Earth and of the resources that we as a human race depend on. This ethic heavily contrasts anthropocentrism since anthropocentrism states that current human activity and humans, in general, are central and most important organisms on the Earth, exceeding those of other animals or even spiritual beings themselves.

Practice

Becoming an ethical omnivore is something that I wanted to become since I was in elementary school because despite not knowing what the term ethical omnivore meant, I was already aware of the factory farming practices being done behind our backs. I did face a difficult problem in trying this practice out. Not only was I a child and was not able to cook my own food, but my family also did not have access to organic or free-range products. Our grocery stores did not stock these items because we were in a low-income neighborhood so the stores there automatically wouldn’t be able to sell these products due to their heftier price. A lot people don’t notice what goes on in the lives of low-income people and how despite lower class citizens being greater in number than those at the top of the economic pyramid, we in the lower class struggle to gain access to more ecologically friendly products while still being dissociated from the problems occurring in our lives. Spending three years of my life homeless, the only options to eat were either leftover from school lunches or if we were lucky enough, a dollar menu burger from Mc Donald’s. It’s not that we don’t want to change our lifestyle, but in reality, we are unable to because of the irregular distribution of resources in the world. Now as a college student, I am in control of what I can eat and what to buy. I’ve reduced eating meat to only two of the seven days of the week. I am able to buy products that are from environmentally friendly sources with knowledge and background information. There are typical practices that almost everyone should adopt that I have started to such as not using plastic cutlery anymore, not using plastic water bottles, being more aware of the electricity I use, and being more aware of where products and my food come from.

My worldview used to be mechanistic until most recently as I was not aware of everything happening in the world around me. I have gained a holistic and ecocentric worldview as my career depends on it and because of recent events in our world making it seem like the only option in order to save our planet. My ethics are also influenced by my career path by believing in theories like the precautionary principle but also through my own experiences affecting who I am as a person thus adopting the need to fight for racial equality. I am now an ethical omnivore and pay more attention to what I eat based on the impact it has on the animal itself but also of the environment and the people around it as well. Generally, my perspective has not changed much within this class but what I have learned is the meaning and gained support of what I stand for not because I think it’s correct from my perspective but because thinking through a holistic point of view, I know that everyone has their experiences that create who they are and how they are as a person. Despite all that, we can all agree that we need to start with ourselves and create our own ways of saving the environment before we can help anyone else do the same.

Works Cited

1. Callicott, J. Baird. Earth's Insights. University of California Press, 1998.
2. Merchant, Carolyn. Ecology. Humanity Books, 2008.
3. Worthy, Kenneth. Invisible Nature: Healing the Destructive Divide between People and the Environment. Prometheus Books, 2013.