Open AccessCrisis and Environmental Philosophy
Author(s) -
Peter Wolsing
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
nordicum-mediterraneum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
ISSN - 1670-6242
DOI - 10.33112/nm.9.3.9
Subject(s) - oppression , anthropocentrism , environmental ethics , environmental crisis , ecological crisis , environmental philosophy , deep ecology , value (mathematics) , natural resource , natural (archaeology) , politics , sociology , environmentalism , political science , law , history , philosophy , archaeology , machine learning , computer science
Environmental ethics began in the 1960s with a growing awareness of coming environmental problems such as pollution and the projected shortage of resources caused by an acceleration in human’s technically based exploitation of nature. In addition to becoming an issue in public debate and in politics since the 1970s, the environmental crisis, which can be laid at the door of industrialization, calls for a more basic consideration of man’s attitude to nature. In this paper I give a short presentation of the concept of crisis in a selection of the principal classical critical philosophies of history and suggest that they all connect crisis to the oppression of man’s inner nature. I go on to sketch the idea of environmental crisis as an oppression of outer nature (the natural environment) suggesting that a new, more nuanced organic concept of nature is needed as a condition for ascribing value to life on earth as a whole, which is what most non-anthropocentric ethical theories to some extent do.