Marietta, Jr., Don E.
Don E. Marietta, Jr. is Adelaide Snyder Distinguished Professor of Ethics and
Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantis University.
Philosophers since Socrates have insisted that the unexamined life is not worth living, but only more recently have environmental philosophers insisted that life in an unexamined world is not worth living either. For People and The Planet, 1995.A holistic view of the place of humans in the natural system challenges the notion that humans are the only heirs of all the natural wealth by showing that this wealth serves organisms of all types. Ibid.
The pagan religions show awareness that human welfare could not be separated from the natural world. The pagans seemed aware that they were part of nature, and it paid to be on the right side of nature. Ibid.
Some American Indian cultures had beliefs and myths that affirmed the unity of all things in nature. Ibid.
The Hebrew culture . . . seems always to have had a negative attitude toward wilderness, sometimes seen as a desolate place of suffering and exile. Ibid.
The New England Puritans accepted the harshest biblical view of wilderness and associated wild areas with the devil; people who visited the forests were considered witches who consort with the devil. Ibid.
The subordination of nature to culture and of woman to man, which Karen J. Warren sees in terms of hierarchical thinking, is expressed in the name by which I refer to the old model "man apart from nature." The word man was used deliberately because a striking feature of the old view of nature is its sexism. It was the male who was seen as apart from nature and superior to nature. The female was closely associated with nature, sharing the inferior status assigned to nature. Ibid.
Until we recognize that we are part of nature, we cannot know who we are. This point was made by Arne Naess in talking about a "relational, total-field image" of the human's place in nature. Ibid.
Aldo Leopold urged the development of an ethic in which the concept of community was extended to include the land and all its creatures, with the role of Homo sapiens that of a "plain member and common citizen" who respects all fellow members of the land community. Ibid.
Various names, such as ecological holism, deep ecology, biocentrism. and eccocentrism, indicate different but somewhat similar approaches to environmental philosophy, at least similar in that they all seem to deny a special place for humans in the scheme of things. Ibid.
Greedy developers claim to put people first, but we know they are putting dollars ahead of everything else. Ibid.
It still strikes me as odd when someone speaks of "the environmentalists," indicating that the speaker is not one of them. I think it will always strike me as strange, irresponsible, and unintelligent. Ibid.
Most environmental ethicists have done their research and thinking by tested and productive methods. Their personal world views have developed from open minds and scientific attitudes. Ibid.