| Index: > A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z |
|
|||||
| First Prev [ 1 2 3 ] Next Last |
The Conservation ethic is an ethic of resource use, allocation, exploitation, and protection. Its primary focus is upon maintaining the health of the natural world: its forests, fisheries, habitats, and biological diversity. Secondary focus is on materials conservation and energy conservation, which are seen as important to protect the natural world.
To conserve habitat in terrestrial ecoregions and stop deforestation is a goal widely shared by many groups with a wide variety of motivations. These issues and groups are covered in their own articles.
To protect sea life from extinction due to overfishing is another commonly stated goal of conservation - ensuring that "some will be available for our children" to continue a way of life.
The consumer conservation ethic is best expressed by the four R's:
This social ethic primarily relates to local purchasing, moral purchasing, the sustained and efficient use of renewable resourceA renewable resource is a natural resource that is not depleted when used by human beings. To some extent it is a slippery concept. With enough technology and energy, any resource can be recycled. Some people consider such resources to be only those thats, the moderation of destructive use of finite resources, and the prevention of harm to common resources such as airNew Mexico releases sulfur dioxide and particulate matter into the air. Air pollution is a broad term applied to all chemical and biological agents that modify the natural characteristics of the atmosphere. Some definitions also consider physical perturba and waterWater pollution has many sources and characteristics. Humans and other organisms produce bodily wastes which enter rivers, lakes, oceans, and other surface waters; in high concentrations these wastes result in bacterial contamination and excessive nutrien quality, the natural functions of a living earth, and cultural values in a built environmentThe expression built environment largely associated with the discipline of urban planning, recognizes that the physical world in which humans function and thrive has been intentionally created; is something aesthetically and functionally shared; and funct.
The principal value underlying most expressions of the conservation ethic is that the natural world has intrinsic and intangible worth along with utilitarian value - a view carried forward by the scientific ecology movementThe global ecology movement is one of several new social movements that supported the formation of Green Parties in many democratic countries beginning at the end of the 1970s. It is views on people, behaviors, events centered around the political and lif and some of the older RomanticRomanticism was an artistic and intellectual movement that originated in late 18th century Western Europe and stressed strong emotion, imagination, freedom from classical correctness in art forms, and rebellion against social conventions. It followed the schools of conservation.
More UtilitarianUtilitarian ethics was formulated first by Jeremy Bentham in 1781, and later championed and elaborated by the philosopher John Stuart Mill. This ethic states that the rightness of an action entirely depends on the value of its consequences, and that the u schools of conservation seek a proper valuation of local and global impacts of human activity upon nature in their effect upon human well being, now and to our posterity. How such values are assessed and exchanged among people determines the social, political, and personal restraints and imperatives by which conservation is practiced. This is a view common in the modern environmental movement.
These movements have diverged but they have deep and common roots in the conservation movement.
In the United States of America, the year 1864 saw the publication of two books which laid the foundation for Romantic and Utilitarian conservation traditions in America. The posthumous publication of Henry David Thoreau's Maine Woods established the grandeur of unspoiled nature as a citadel to nourish the spirit of man. From George Perkins Marsh a very different book, Man and Nature , later subtitled "The Earth as Modified by Human Nature", cataloged his observations of man exhausting and altering the land from which his sustenance derives.