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LECTURES: Introduction What is your environmental ethic? (take the survey) Anthopocentric - human center, the resources of the planet have no intrinsic value, except for that which can used by humans. Weak Anthopocentric - Ecocentric - a balanced position, the built and natural environments are both significant. Weak Biocentric - earth centered, humans are inferior and less important than nature. Biocentric - strongly earth centered. Aldo Leopold's words follow: "All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. His instincts prompt him to compete for his place in the community, but his ethics prompt him also to co-operate (perhaps in order that there may be a place to compete for). The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land."  Art Hawkins, Alice Harper Stokes and Aldo Leopold. 1946 Wallace Stegner, from the Wilderness Letter, 1960: "Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed; if we permit the last virgin forests to be turned into comic books and plastic cigarette cases; if we drive the few remaining members of the wild species into zoos or to extinction; if we pollute the last clear air and dirty the last clean streams..."  Wallace Stegner. 1950's Extension Exercize: Read the Earth Charter (can you sign it?) New Jersey's Current State of Environmental Issues State of the World, Mikhail S. Gorbachev |
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