Environmental Ethics

All the world's religions, faith traditions, and spiritualities pay respect to the concept of environmental ethics. While it is a commonly held belief that environmental ethics is a relatively new field, coming to life in the 1970s, the idea is present in Jewish and Christian sacred scriptures.

However, the early 1970s started the first celebration of Earth Day and the acknowledgement of environmental ethics as a separate field of study within philosophy and ethics. The field emerged almost simultaneously in three countries; Australia, the United States, and Norway. In the first two of these countries, direction and inspiration came largely from the earlier 20th century literature of the environment. The Scottish emigrant John Muir (founder of the Sierra Club and the “father of American conservation”) and subsequently the forester Aldo Leopold had advocated an appreciation and conservation of things natural, wild, and free. There is now a linking of environmental ethics with the animal rights movement.

Caring for and being attuned to the environment, as promoted and practiced in environmental ethics, have long been key aspects of the religious and spiritual developmental trajectories of individuals and communities. Environmental ethics is taught in a variety of contexts—religious programs, schools, one-on-one interactions, and in personal revelations often gained through experiences in nature.

The book of Genesis in the Jewish sacred texts, which all Christians also accept, is the starting point for ethical environmental treatment. Chapter I verses 26–30 states,

The prophets of the Jewish sacred texts teach about faith and justice. The quality of one's personal faith is dependent upon the quality of justice. Where one stands with one's Creator is dependent upon where one stands with those on the fringes of society, i.e., the poor, the widows, the aliens, those with illnesses. The dignity of the human person is always to be upheld, since the human person is created in God's image and likeness. Environmental ethics now links the concept of the dignity of the person to the dignity of creation. Some ethicists claim that one protects human dignity by rights and duties, and rights are a moral claim to a good that is essential to human dignity. Therefore, the environment is also essential to human dignity. To continue this line of thought, since the human person is sacred and social, one needs to be in community. There are many levels of community: family, civil society, region, or nation, but the most basic community is the community of the earth. This connection allows the linking of stewardship with the purpose of humanity.

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