Arctic Environmental Cooperation: A Study in Governmentality by Monica Tennberg

Author:Monica Tennberg [Tennberg, Monica]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: International Relations, Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781351763257
Google: YlM8DwAAQBAJ
Goodreads: 6242936
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2000-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The Human-Environment Relationship

Ethics and Environmental Discourse

Regimes institutionalize a particular ethical stand on the human-environment relationship. In the anthropocentric (or human-centered) approach, environmental problems are a destructive factor in human life; they limit the possibilities to enjoy healthy, safe and comfortable surroundings. Human-centered ethics emphasize future generations and their possibility to use resources for their own development. Human needs and interests form the basis of the entire ethical system of standards and rules governing the relationship between humans and nature (Passmore, 1974, p.73–81; Eckersley, 1992, p.33–47).

In the biocentric (or life-centered) view, the question relates to factors threatening life on earth. This view is that expansionist human action threatens life-supporting systems. Life-centered approaches do not consider the duties towards nature to be derived from people’s duties towards each other. In the life-centered approach, obligations and responsibilities are seen as arising from certain moral relations between human beings and nature. The natural world, in this approach, is not seen simply as an object to be exploited; animals, plants etc., are regarded as more than resources for human use. Living things are considered to have a worth of their own, irrespective of their actual or possible usefulness to human beings (Rolston, 1988, p.216–220; Taylor, 1986, p.12–13).

The concept of sustainable development reflects a particular way of understanding the human relationships between how economic activity and natural resources are arranged. These could be called ‘world views’ including the aspects of an ethical stance on the relations between man, the environment and the world. According to the World Commission Report on Environment and Development, sustainable development is ‘development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ (World Commission on Development and Environment, 1987, p.8).

The idea of sustainable development represents the tradition of resource management in defining the human-environment relationship. Resource management is anthropocentric at its core; hurting nature is beginning to hurt economic man. Thus, the instrumental economic paradigm prevails, although it is enlarged to encompass some basic ecological principles in an attempt to maintain ecosystem stability for the support of sustainable development; in short ecology is being economized (see Colby, 1992).

The World Commission demonstrated how economic growth depended heavily on the increasing use of environmental resources and also documented the impact of policies. Many of its conclusions, however, reaffirmed the fundamental premises of conventional development thinking, in particular the stress on economic growth above all else. The main benefit of the concept of sustainable development is that although it still considers economic growth as the main aim, it also includes the ecologic constraint, or ‘ecological imperative,’ that there are limits that should not be broken. The question of what the limits are and how they should be defined is essentially left open (Turner, 1988, p.5).

Defining the limits of development means defining the basis for the criteria of sustainability. The alternatives are to either use ecological or social criteria. The idea of social development requires that state governments recognize and accommodate the rights of indigenous peoples to self-government, lands and renewable and non-renewable resources.

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