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What is the relationship between humanity and nature in the wild
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The relationship between humanity and nature has undergone a power shift since the time of cave paintings in Lascaux. The Tragedy of the Commons describes a balance between pre-industrial humans and nature, a relationship of morbid regulation. Human kind was prosperous, however limited in growth by various methods of population culling, which prevented humans from dominating the resources presented by nature. The issue occurs when humans reach a point of social cohesiveness that they are able to resist nature’s methods of population regulation and grow uninhibited. At this moment I believe humans departed from our relationship with nature, we circumvented the terms of natures presence in the relationship and embodied a supreme position of exploitation of every facet of nature. This is where my photo takes place. This photo is an embodiment of the modern connection between humans and nature, as well as contemporary culture in industrialized countries. Although the photo is dated, it is a testament to the scale of uninhibited resource extraction that humans have enjoyed since the industrial revolution. These trees are commodified and used for personal financial …show more content…
Humankind has flourished through the cooperation of humans, and on a broader level, governments. Most humans live significantly longer, more luxurious lives than they would in pre-modernity. Through capitalism humans have the opportunity to pursue wealth and take advantage of the free market, resulting in a competitive atmosphere which forces advancements in technology. However, I would argue that the destruction of the environment that is required to maintain this level of consumption will result in the destruction of most humans, or a massive normative shift to a more primitive lifestyle, possibly even a return to a state of nature such as prescribed by
of people sharing a resource tend to utilize it to satisfy their own needs, but
Man has destroyed nature, and for years now, man has not been living in nature. Instead, only little portions of nature are left in the world
It is easy to deny the reality that the state of the environment plays a large role in the survival of society. People who argue to protect and preserve it are seen as “hippies” or “tree huggers” and discarded by society. On the other hand, those who support deforestation are seen as “killing us all.” This conflict that is often portrayed on modern media is actually one that span all the way back to the beginning of civilization. Jared Diamond, recipient of the Lewis Thomas Prize and physiology professor at UCLA School of Medicine, his essay “Why do Some Societies Make Disastrous Decisions” published by Edge on April 26, 2003, argues exactly how societies can doom themselves. Diamond creates his own roadmap as to how and why problems occur. He shows the various ways of how a problem may arise and be
As time passes, our population continues to increase and multiply; yet, on the other hand, our planet’s resources continue to decrease and deplete. As our population flourishes, human beings also increase their demands and clamor for the Earth’s natural products, yet are unable to sacrifice their surplus of the said resources. Garret Hardin’s work highlighted the reality that humans fail to remember that the Earth is finite and its resources are limited. Hardin’s article revealed that people are unable to fathom that we indeed have a moral obligation to our community and our natural habitat — that we are not our planet’s conquerors but its protectors. We fail to acknowledge and accept that we only have one Earth and that we must protect and treasure it at all costs. Despite all our attempts at annihilating the planet, the Earth will still be unrelenting — it will still continue to be present and powerful. Human beings must recognize that we need this planet more than it needs us and if we persist on being egocentric and covetous, in the end it is us who will
The “Tragedy of the Commons” is an inevitable result of human nature coined by ecologist Garrett Hardin in his 1968 article of the same name. In the article Hardin reports that open resources such as game animals or rivers, “commons”, will be destroyed due to natural human selfishness by the individual. This is clear in the case of overfishing in Peru, for example, which environmental historian Gregory Cushman discusses in his book on Peruvian fishing industries. Hardin provides two solutions: either privatization or mutual coercion agreed upon by those most affected. Due to globalization the people who are most affected are far too diverse to collectively agree to cut back on consumption. The cause of over consumption no longer lies upon the
Leopold defends his position the advent of a new ethical development, one that deals with humans’ relations to the land and its necessity. This relationship is defined as the land ethic, this concept holds to a central component referred to as the ecological consciousness. The ecological consciousness is not a vague ideal, but one that is not recognized in modern society. It reflects a certainty of individual responsibility for the health and preservation of the land upon which we live, and all of its components. If the health of the land is upheld, its capacity of self-renewal and regeneration is maintained as well. To date, conservation has been our sole effort to understand and preserve this capacity. Leopold holds that if the mainstream embraces his ideals of a land ethic and an ecological consciousness, the beauty, stability and integrity of our world will be preserved.
In his essay, The Ethics of Respect for Nature, Paul Taylor presents his argument for a deontological, biocentric egalitarian attitude toward nature based on the conviction that all living things possess equal intrinsic value and are worthy of the same moral consideration. Taylor offers four main premises to support his position. (1) Humans are members of the “Earth’s community of life” in the same capacity that nonhuman members are. (2) All species exist as a “complex web of interconnected elements” which are dependent upon one another for their well-being. (3) Individual organisms are “teleological centers of life” which possess a good of their own and a unique way in which to pursue it. (4) The concept that humans are superior to other species is an unsupported anthropocentric bias.
Today in the news we constantly hear about increasing global temperatures, horrific levels of pollution, and rapid destruction of natural habitats; we undoubtable live in a time of server ecological crisis. The social philosophy of environmental justice addresses and acts upon this unanswered injustice. There are three main concepts to do so. First, according to White, we need to reject Christianity’s and science’s justification for human’s hieratical domination over nature. Secondly, Robbins discusses how Capitalism’s model of consumption causes negative environmental consequences, as seen within the sugar-beef complex. Lastly, Loy provides a solution to this injustice by rejecting dualism and calling for unity and respect for mother Earth.
Our classical humanist ethic requires that all duty attach itself to an individual “self”, a value-able entity with rights and duties of its own. But nature operates on a different basis: “there are no rights in the wild, and nature is indifferent to the welfare of particular animals” (Rolston, p.75). In order to formulate an autonomous environmental ethics, then, we must be able to move beyond the humanist focus on the self, towards a new source of value and a new type of value. In this essay, I intend to examine the idea of value in nature, drawing especially on Holmes Rolston III’s concept of systemic value and ecosytemic ethics and Aldo Leopold’s land aesthetic (as presented by J. Baird Callicott). There are striking similarities between these two accounts that seem to point to an ethical/aesthetic consensus that it is the unity, interconnectedness, and interdependence of nature that is to be valued. A move beyond the “self” is a move towards the system, the biotic community. However, I also want to examine the potential challenges posed to the idea of ecosystemic ethics by Leopold’s noumenon.
Conquerors and competitors, that’s what humans and all animals are to a point; every living thing on Earth has one mission: survive and reproduce. The balance of the environment relies on this concept of constant competition, but this balance also has checks and controls if it is damaged or becomes unstable. Humans have developed to the point where they can completely exploit the environment however they want. There are no natural predators to control our population, we fight diseases with ground-breaking technology, and we replace native plants and animals with ones that fit our “needs” more suitably. We have, in a sense, created our own world of culture and trading that is separate from the natural world. In this new world, economic prosperity trumps all, and conservation and preservation takes a backseat if the dollar signs aren’t favorable. This realization has led many, including one of the founders of conservation, Aldo Leopold, to be pessimistic about whether a system of conservation based on economic self-interest can succeed. He states in his work The Land Ethic, “a system of conservation based solely on economic self-interest is hopelessly lopsided” (756). I, on the other hand, have more faith and optimism that humans will realize the importance of this other world, and live in harmony with it. I believe this because of the possible consequences of exploiting the natural world, the eventual realization that we need to conserve resources for future use and our future physical and economic survival, and the recent trend that these scenarios are starting to be realized, put into practice, and educated to others. Humans have the natural instinct to survive, and a higher level of thinking and problem solving will accompany th...
I propose that in modern environmental ethics there lies two distinct forms of the the phrase “dehumanization of nature” that have lead to the environmental problems that we have face today. First, we have the “dehumanization of nature” in which humans are perceived as separate from nature. And the second definition in which nature is stolen of its human-like or natural qualities. Both cause an emotional disconnect between human nature and nonhuman nature.
Progress and the Total Destruction of the Earth Throughout all of history, humans have evolved not only genetically, but also culturally. Of the two evolutionary processes, cultural evolution happens more quickly, and has had a more noticeable effect on the environment compared to genetic evolution. Early hunter/gatherer societies evolved to agrarian society, which then had technological changes that affected the culture of the society. Unfortunately, while humans have been culturally evolving towards what is perceived to be progress, the environment has been compromised, marginalized, and degraded as it is continually exploited for human benefit and consumption. The culture of hunter/gatherer society was the least damaging to the environment in the long term before humans developed agriculture.
This “Tragedy of the Commons” is a concept first put forward by William Forster Loyd but more often is attributed to the ecologist Garett Hardin ("Tragedy of the commons", 2016). The concept can be explained as a situation in which a common resource is shared by many. Each individual attempts to maximise their share of the resource with little regard to others and therefore the resource begins to be over exploited. Furthermore, the individuals involved each feels as though their actions do not contribute to the inevitable decline of the shared resource
Throughout history, many individuals wish to discover and explain the relationship between nature and society, however, there are many complexities relating to this relationship. The struggle to understand how nature and society are viewed and connected derives from the idea that there are many definitions of what nature is. The Oxford dictionary of Human Geography (2003), explains how nature is difficult to define because it can be used in various contexts as well as throughout different time and spaces. As a result of this, the different understandings of what nature is contributes to how the nature society relationship is shaped by different processes. In order to better understand this relation there are many theorists and philosophers
Feeny, David, Fikret Berkes, Bonnie J. McCay, and James M. Acheson 1990 The tragedy of the commons: twenty-two years later. Human Ecology 18(1): 1-19.