Ethics in the Anthropocene
Last week in Stockholm, humanity was put on trial.
Almost 20 Nobel laureates showed up for jury duty at the third Nobel Laureate
Symposium. There they heard about "how [humanity's] vast imprint on the
planet's environment has shifted the Earth into a new geological period labeled
the 'Anthropocene'--the Age of Man."
After deliberation, the Nobelists rendered a verdict
as part of the Stockholm Memorandum (pdf), reporting that humans have become the most significant driver of
global change. While schoolchildren are taught that we are still in the
Holocene--the epoch that began after the last ice age, roughly 12,000 years
ago--the symposium's scientists argue that we have transgressed the planetary
boundaries that have kept civilizations safe for this long.
There's no question that humans have become "capable of
leaving a durable imprint in the geological record." But is this
necessarily a bad thing?
In a New York Times
forum called The
Age of Anthropocene: Should We Worry? ecologist Erle C. Ellis makes an
interesting point: we can either write the planet off as irrecoverably ruined,
or we can redefine what the orienting "good" is in environmental ethics. "This
is where it gets tricky," he says:
What "good" replaces pristineness?
Biodiversity? Ecosystem services that benefit humans? Historical fidelity?
Beauty? The most pleasure for the most sentient species?
Environmentalism often takes a preservationist angle; its
aim has been to make minimal changes to pristine habitats. But now many
habitats are so clearly "artificial" that preservationism seems pointless.
Habitats and species evolve in a complex system of
interdependence. This is a difficult concept to grasp. How are we Christians to
think about and rethink our responsibilities in this era?
Some see new opportunities for generosity: for attentive
practical reasoning, greater devotion and covenantal responsibility. "Because
the world is a commonwealth of interdependent creatures in common dependence on
theologian Douglas F. Ottati,
[and] because the telos of God's world is the radically
transformative and inclusive community, acknowledged relationships and
communities of interdependence enhance possibilities for true virtue, for life, or for appropriately faithful
participation in God's world.
However we define this new epoch, the issues we face are
international in scope, and they will demand clear ethical frameworks.