Ethical issues ignored in sustainability education, research
EAST LANSING, Mich. — Just about everyone agrees that sustainability – cutting energy use, reducing carbon emissions and, in general, keeping the Earth green – is a good thing. But why do we think that? Do we support sustainability for the right reasons?
These are among the questions that Michigan State University’s Michael Nelson addresses in a paper published this month in the journal Bioscience titled “Sustainability: Virtuous or Vulgar?”
Specifically, Nelson and co-author John Vucetich of Michigan Technological University argue that the issue of ethics is a vital component in the teaching and research of sustainability, but one that is sorely lacking.
“This debate,” they write, “has almost entirely neglected a fundamental dimension of sustainability – the ethical dimension. Lack of attention to the ethical dimension of sustainability is stifling progress toward sustainability.”
Or, as Nelson puts it: “If we don’t know where we’re going, we won’t know when we get there.”
Nelson said that from the educational perspective, it’s important that all aspects of sustainability are covered.
“Everything we do sends messages to our students,” he said. “We see our students as people who will go out and do important things in this world. It’s important how we nurture that.”
The ultimate question, the authors say, is this: “Do we care about ecosystem health because ecosystems are intrinsically valuable, or do we care about ecosystem health because it serves human interests?”
While a question such as this is difficult to answer, Nelson said that “we are unlikely to achieve sustainability without knowing what it means.”
In their paper, Nelson and Vucetich consider the most widely appreciated definitions of sustainability, which indicate at least roughly that sustainability is “meeting human needs in a socially just manner without depriving ecosystems of their health.”
While the definition seems quite specific, it could mean anything from “exploit as much as desired without infringing on the future ability to exploit as much as desired” to “exploit as little as necessary to maintain a meaningful life.”
“From a single definition rises two wildly disparate views of a sustainable world,” said Vucetich. “Handling these disparate views is the inescapable ethical crisis of sustainability.”
“The crisis results from not knowing what we mean by value-laden terms like ‘ecosystem health’ and ‘human needs,’” Nelson said. “In other words, is ecosystem health defined by its ability to meet human needs only, or does ecosystem health define the limits of human need?”
Nelson is an associate professor with appointments in MSU’s Lyman Briggs College and the departments of Fisheries and Wildlife and Philosophy. Vucetich is an assistant professor in MTU’s School of Forest Resources and Environmental Science.
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One more clue, S. Goldsmith: The answer is hidden in your sentence
“If you don’t agree with this then maybe you could then work out how we will be able to replace phosphorous (an essential element in our industrial agricultural systems)”.
@Gail Combs: “the bills would drive all organic farmers out of business leaving corporate monoculture farms as the only farms left”
I recently saw “The Botany of Desire” (available via netflix instant for those who have it). I thought it did a good job of explaining the demand for and dangers of monoculture.
Oh NO! S. Goldsmith is RIGHT! We’re running out of PHOSPHORUS:
http://energybulletin.net/node/33164
We’re DOOMED.
Gail, Walter, et. al. I don’t know why this Climategate email has gotten so little play, but it should have opened up more eyes as to the agenda:
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=54&filename=889554019.txt
They even use the term “global governance.” The good old B1 Sustainable Development scenario has the alarmists frothing about the possibilities. My favorite line from the final report they were drafting in the email:
“Massive income redistribution and presumably high taxation levels may adversely affect the economic efficiency and functioning of world markets.”
You don’t say! The final report (minus references to global governance) can be found here:
http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/emission/index.php?idp=94#1
I have had alarmists come back at me on other sites (most notable MMfA) with charges of black helicopters and tin foil hats, but my answer is always the same: how can it be a conspiracy if it is so blatantly and openly advertised?
If you give those a read, do some number crunching and compare A1 Golden Economic Age to B1 Sustainable Development. The bottom line is if the alarmists have their B1 way, wealth worldwide will have been cut in half by 2100 (vs. A1). The numbers are even more dramatic for the world’s poor, so anyone who claims that B1 will help to eradicate poverty is either a dreamer or an outright liar.
In parting, be afraid. Fear is good. Hopefully it will get you and many others to rise up against the tide that threatens us. I have a 4-year-old son and, to borrow a phrase, I have not yet begun to fight!
S. Goldsmith, re running out of resources.
I have a serious question for you. Exactly where do you believe the dwindling resources disappeared to? By my reckoning, each atom is still here on the Earth, with the sole exceptions of those few tons of materials that Man has rocketed into space and out of Earth’s gravitational well, and the few that are transmuted in nuclear reactions.
No elements in or on the Earth are “lost” or in short supply. The only thing separating Man from an abundance of everything is ingenuity and energy. Including Phosphorus.
DirkH says:
July 6, 2010 at 3:52 pm
“Oh NO! S. Goldsmith is RIGHT! We’re running out of PHOSPHORUS:
http://energybulletin.net/node/33164
We’re DOOMED.”
Ha ha. Just wanted to talk up my shares 😉
http://peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/2007/12/321-peak-phosphorus.html
PNeilson says:
July 6, 2010 at 9:07 am
“Who defines “ethics” and why? ….
…. Our mission, should we choose to accept it, is to rescue objective ethics before it is again lost.”
There never was such a thing as objective ethics. It did not exist when the Catholic Church operated its Index Librorum Prohibitorum (“List of Prohibited Books”), nor when the Church finally abolished the Index. It did not exist in any of the nations engaged in the pursuit of the principles of socialism, most definitely not in Nazi Germany. I remember the latter well, because that is where and when I began my schooling. All of them had their own individual, peculiar, national, ideology-driven brands of allegedly objective standards of ethics; and we know where all of that got us.
The new liberalism of the sort promoted by the UN is no different, those on this list that suffer the consequences of not toeing the party line of politically-correct thought in the pursuit of science should know.
Virtually all of the UN’s unelected bureaucracy exists for only one reason, to cater to the need to constantly define and modify its expressions and diktat comprised of various specification for the ethical standards it wishes to impose on the world. The ethical standards imposed by the UN are neither objective nor fixed. They are being adjusted more and more to make them fit the goals of the UN in its program for the creation of socialist totalitarianism.
S. Goldsmith says:
July 6, 2010 at 12:58 pm
“Dear Ms Combs & Enneagram,
Fortunately I don’t suffer a kind of paranoia that assumes that anything for the collective good such as sustainability is part of a socialist conspiracy of world domination and wealth control.
Rather I am fortunate to have an open mind…
I challenge you to show me how we are to live in a finite world with an increasing population seeking higher consumption levels within whilst natural resources continue to swindle. If you can then I would love to hear them.”
Some suggestions for reading that will help to debunk fears instilled by ‘The Limits of Growth’ were already mentioned in subsequent posts. I would like to add: “The Skeptical Environmentalist: Measuring the Real State of the World,” by Bjørn Lomborg.
Link to amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dus-stripbooks-tree&field-keywords=The+skeptical+environmentalist&x=11&y=17
Link to a list of a few commentaries on Bjørn Lomborg that you may find helpful: http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Lomborg+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.john-daly.com&btnG=Search&aq=f&aqi=&aql=&oq=&gs_rfai=
This commentary by Bjørn Lomborg is a good one, as it specifically addresses the subject of sustainability and politically-correct misconceptions that allegedly exist to limit sustainability, that is, an 11-page critique by the Scientific American to which Bjørn Lomborg responds: http://fathersforlife.org/doc/Lomborg_vs_Siam.pdf
S. Goldsmith says:
If you have got a list of goals to achieve then please can you post them.
Goals? You mean like “world peace”? This isn’t the Miss America pageant.
The key to all of humanity’s ills lies in economic hardship. Raise people’s standards of living and you automatically increase their health, welfare, and productivity. Easier said than done though, right? Economic activity has to be as free and as unfettered by government as possible. Yes, of course pollution is a concern. It is wealthier societies who have the wherewithal to deal with that. Here’s a little clue for you: raising the cost of energy based on nothing but a much-hyped but groundless fear is going to do nothing but destroy wealth; the exact opposite thing that is needed to protect the environment and raise standards of living. Another thing: what humanity needs, and needs desperately is true science, not government-run pal-reviewed grant-seeking job-maintaining pseudo-science. And make no mistake, the concept of “sustainability” is just that.
SUSTAINABILITY = AGENDA 21 = GENOCIDE = POPULATION REDUCTION of 93%…
AGENDA 21 FOR DUMMIES
NWO / CLUB OF ROME DEPOPULATION & AGENDA 21
DirkH says:
July 6, 2010 at 3:52 pm
Oh NO! S. Goldsmith is RIGHT! We’re running out of PHOSPHORUS:
http://energybulletin.net/node/33164
We’re DOOMED.
________________________________________________________________
Time to start raising bats. Bat guano is rich in PHOSPHORUS: that is why they used to mine it to make gun powder.
VIVA Der Fledermaus!
Observations –
1. “We” would like to have “so and so”, “they” would like to have “such and such”, we and they have to communicate our so and so’s and such and such’s with words. The problem is the words.
2. There’s not much disagreement here, really there isn’t. The problem is the words.
3. English is a terrible language, but for many it’s all we have.
#
#
galileonardo says:
July 6, 2010 at 3:56 pm
Gail, Walter, et. al. I don’t know why this Climategate email has gotten so little play, but it should have opened up more eyes as to the agenda:
http://www.eastangliaemails.com/emails.php?eid=54&filename=889554019.txt
They even use the term “global governance….
_______________________________________________________________________
Thanks for the reference. I knew Agenda 21 and CAGW were connected and now here is the proof. Next is to connect in the Financial Stability Board. The WTO agreement on Ag is already connected in through the WTO/UN join projects like the guide to good farming practices.
Kissinger’s control oil, food and money formula.
S. Goldsmith says:
July 6, 2010 at 2:34 pm
“Bruce Cobb et al,
I’m still awaiting what your “better world” will look like. How will it deal with the limits of a finite planet, how will it respond to issues such as ocean acidification and toxic bioaccumulation within humans? How will it ensure that all the 9 billion people that will live on this planet will be able to live to the same standards, presumably using the same amounts of resource and creating similar amounts of pollution by 2050.
If you have got a list of goals to achieve then please can you post them.
Thank you.”
Is this a game of “king of the castle”?
The game of social control, domination and military conquest for achieving ideological goals was a failure for communist national socialism as well as for national socialism of the Hitler kind. That is as true for regional applications as it is for global ones. The major differences are the scale and the fact that when the playing field expands to incorporate all of the globe, no escape is possible and neither is rescue by outside forces. We will then have a water empire in which the religion of environmentalism and its priesthood rule with an iron hand.
Check: http://www.bing.com/reference/semhtml/?title=Hydraulic_empire&qpvt=water+empire&src=abop&fwd=1&q=water+empire
I prefer economic freedom and freedom of choice.
“A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom. The use of force to achieve equality will destroy freedom, and the force, introduced for good purposes, will end up in the hands of people who use it to promote their own interests.” (Milton and Rose Friedman
in “Free to Choose: A Personal Statement”)
About “toxic bioaccumulation within humans”, on average it must be quite good for humans, at least in North America and in all of the developed nations, where average life expectancies increased from about 47 years to more than 70 years during the past 110 years.
As to “ocean acidification,” that is not a problem, at least not according to the many posts here I read on that during the past little while. It is not a problem anyone needs to deal with or even worry about. If you don’t believe that, then search this blog. I don’t believe that you wish anyone else to go through all of the postings on non-existent ocean acidification and to fail to find anything that proves the unprovable, something that was thoroughly debunked.
S. Goldsmith says:
July 6, 2010 at 2:00 pm
Gail Combs:
…..I am pretty sure that the countries that agree that sustainability is a key issue for their futures aren’t socialist or communists which you seem to directly associate (for the record the UK has a ‘socialist’ government for 13 years and I can’t recall any real changes to the way people lived there or how businesses behaved).
______________________________________________________________________
HMMMmmm You do realize that sustainability is NOT organic farming don’t you? The regs are all about regulating the small farmers and businesses into bankruptcy to leave a clear field for the transnational cartels. The UN may SAY it is about sustainability, but that is just to placate the masses. It is about control and a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich.
You said I can’t recall any real changes to the way people lived there or how businesses behaved However there have been very big changes in the UK. Unfortunately the connect the dots never gets in the news so most people do not notice.
Here is the first example:
1. World Trade Organization Agreement on Agriculture is passed in 1995
2. The EU implements the WTO “traceability” and the UN OIE rules
3. Many UK slaughter houses are shut down because they can not meet the new rules. (HACCP???)
4. New rules on livestock keeping are implemented
5. Pirbright laboratory releases Foot and Mouth disease
That was the set up.
In the past a case of foot & mouth would be treated by the local vet. The animal slaughtered and buried in caustic lime and the rest of the herd sent to slaughter (it does not hurt the meat) Surrounding farms would vaccinate for FMD – END OF PROBLEM
The “Global Governance – sustainable” method:
This time (2001) the EU, OIE and the UK government got involved thanks to the WTO agreements. It was a major disaster, 16 farmers suicided, carcasses piled high and left to rot instead of slaughtered or buried, no vaccination allowed by the government, and an entire industry, including rare breeds decimated. For the whole story see: http://www.warmwell.com/footmoutheye.html
Another example is the removal of 60% of the farmers in Portugal and the EU’s stated intention to remove a million farmers in Poland.
“The Battle to Save the Polish Countryside
Julian Rose exposes the scandal of EU’s deliberate policy to get rid of family farms for the benefit of the corporations and gives a personal account of his battle with the GMO dragon that threatens to devastate rural Poland…” http://www.i-sis.org.uk/savePolishCountryside.php
unless you live on the leading edge of modern civilization, utilizing all it generates there will be stagnation. Imagine living at the apex of modern life style fifty years ago. Today its much less expensive for a much better product for many more people. I guess you could subsist on a lot less, but who is to say that had progress proceeded you wouldn’t have found a less environment impacting method while at the same time increasing the life standards of the worlds population.
Choosing the direction of evolution, like choosing the path of development, like choosing tomorrows weather is fraught with unseen pitfalls. Better to let the evolution of development proceed than risk the stagnation of humankind.
Bravo! Ad astra!
/Mr Lynn
Perhaps you missed my earlier links to the seminal contributions by E. M. Smith, so I’ll repeat them:
“THERE IS NO SHORTAGE OF STUFF, AND THERE NEVER WILL BE”—E. M. Smith
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/there-is-no-shortage-of-stuff/
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/there-is-no-energy-shortage/
Read those two articles, and also the works of Julian Simon others have referenced, and then the terrific comments above by Cassandra King, and learn what the true, unlimited potential of mankind is. There are no limits to human progress, except those we foolishly impose upon ourselves.
/Mr Lynn
Gail Combs says:
July 6, 2010 at 3:27 pm
========================
Gail….as always….you are RIGHT ON.
Grrrrrrrrr.
Your friend one state to the north,
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
galileonardo says:
July 6, 2010 at 3:56 pm
=====================
Well said.
And I will gladly FIGHT along with you.
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
[snip.. take it elsewhere. ~ ctm]
S. Goldsmith
Here is what happen to your “model society” (power and GREED)
bruce says:
July 6, 2010 at 7:21 pm
unless you live on the leading edge of modern civilization, utilizing all it generates there will be stagnation….
Choosing the direction of evolution, like choosing the path of development, like choosing tomorrows weather is fraught with unseen pitfalls….
_________________________________________________________________________
The direction of evolution of the US society was guided by a few people over a long period directly into that stagnation you warn of.
Here is a couple of examples for you:
Energy
Strong, as I stated before was Chair of the first Earth Summit in 1972, he was also trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation. Strong invited Greenpeace and others to the First Earth Summit and had the Canadian gov’t pay their way. At the Summit he asked them to “go home and raise hell” Greenpeace receives funds from the Rockefeller foundations. Remember that Strong and the Rockefeller are big oil Moguls.
What do you think the position was of the big oil and energy companies towards Nuclear a major competitor in the sixties and seventies? When I lived near a nuclear plant in New York my electric bill was $10/month when I moved to New Hampshire (no nuclear) it shot up to $300/month!
I found it interesting that the Boston Globe had Employment Want Ads – $10/hr paid for protesting at the Seabrook Nuclear site in the eighties. So who was actually paying to have the nuclear industry shut down in the USA??? – remember who was funding Greenpeace? The various Rockefeller Foundations owners of various oil companies.
What would have happen if instead of France, using a US design, the United States was the one to built enough Nuclear plants to provide 90% of our electric power? Do you think all our manufacturing would have left the county for foreign countries with cheap electric available???
How about poverty and the population increase?
What would happen in the USA if we left the 1950’s solutions in place? Doctors and dentists could give free medical care, churches and communities could provide aid, vagrants could be picked up and place in the county home, a mental institution or jail as the situation called for, individuals were free to work as baby sitters, maids, gardeners, mechanics and handimen all without the hassle of government regs or the IRS and lots of paperwork to stifle them. And welfare payments would not compete with the job hunting/entrepreneur initiatives. So what if welfare did NOT pay teenagers to have babies as their life’s work? Think we would have less third generation welfare babies around?
(Note to socialists: poverty, free medical care, and child abuse was handled locally in the fifties. I can give examples from my own childhood as an abused child living in a relatively poor farming area.)
More important what if the business and banking leaders who formed a “..group, called the Committee for Economic Development, was officially established in 1942…. CED has influenced US domestic policies in much the same way that the CFR has influenced the nation’s foreign policies.” So what if the CED had not “…determined that the problem with American agriculture was that there were too many farmers. But the CED had a “solution”: millions of farmers would just have to be eliminated….
In its 1945 report “Agriculture in an Expanding Economy,” CED complained that “the excess of human resources engaged in agriculture is probably the most important single factor in the “farm problem'” and describes how agricultural production can be better organized to fit to business needs.[2] A report published in 1962 entitled “An Adaptive Program for Agriculture”[3] is even more blunt in its objectives, leading Time Magazine to remark that CED had a plan for fixing the identified problem: “The essential fact to be faced, argues CED, is that with present high levels farm productivity, more labor is involved in agriculture production that the market demands ” in short, there are too may farmers. To solve that problem, CED offers a program with three main prongs.””
Why would CED member corporations want to destroy farms? Easy – for corporations, unemployed farmers and farm workers provided an excess of cheap labor to choose from. Why would bankers want to destroy farms? Easy – all of the personal income tax the IRS collects goes into the bankers pockets as interest on government loans. It is easier to get those tax dollars from corporations BEFORE wages are paid than from independent entrepreneurs AFTER the money is in their hands. Bankers are also very eager to support expensive socialist bureaucracies because the government borrows nonexistent money from them and then pays them back with real wealth plus interest. Corporations want more regulations to stifle start up and smaller competitors.
So what happen to the well integrated society of the fifties?
” CED’s plans resulted in widespread social upheaval throughout rural America, ripping apart the fabric of its society destroying its local economies. They also resulted in a massive migration to larger cities. The loss of a farm also means the loss of identity, and many farmers’ lives ended in suicide [6], not unlike farmers in India today who have been tricked into debt and desperation and can see no other way out.”
Source: http://www.opednews.com/articles/History-HACCP-and-the-Foo-by-Nicole-Johnson-090906-229.html
Minimal government and local solutions if at all possible are the best government. The larger the governing body, the more area covered, the less responsive to local conditions and the more expensive.
Forgive me with the obtuseness of my quote, it’s from The Princess Bride and in reference to your use of the word “fact” to describe things that are your opinion.
@Aynsley Kellow
@Gail Combs
@most others
The sustainability topic is the essential flaw and main catastrophe of the AGW movement.
It is arduous and unreliable to predict a future for climate given the current state of understanding. However when one uses sustainability as a focus of consideration the evolution of events is apparent.
Sustainability and the confusion surrounding it’s dynamic relates directly to climax communities Malthusianism globalism sociology and economics as mentioned in the posts above. Yet sustainability also directly relates to k-selection biological evolution and holistic process.
K-selection biological evolution and holistic processes are not understood. It is unavoidably easy to be captured and recruited into a local subjective basin of purview.
If one cannot predict the climate, if one cannot avoid subjective entrapment is there anything that can be expected? Yes …
It can be assumed that sustainability will be exploited as an inflationary bubble.
By monetising valuing ethicalising or constraining presumed sources of AGW, we encourage hording exploiting hiding misrepresenting virtualizing offsetting or in general inflating the AGW source.
The AGW debate accelerates the involvement of it’s anticipated causal precursors.
Rumors of famine stimulate hoarding consumption and the search for unexploited alternatives. Those recruited alternatives can be cryptic inflationary virtualizations of the same limited fundamental resource.
We only fool ourselves.