Human Natures, Nature Conservation, and Environmental Ethics

TL;DR: Although scientists understand the general directions in which humanity should be moving to solve its environmental problems, the policy response of society remains pathetic and the cutting edge of the environmental sciences is now moving from the ecological and physical sciences toward the behavioral sciences, which seem to have the potential to develop ways to improve that response.

Abstract: Articles T here is little dispute within the knowledgeable scientific community today about the global ecological situation and the resultant need for nature conservation (e.g., NAS 1993, UCS 1993). Now is a time of unprecedented, escalating , and well-documented environmental danger. There is general agreement among environmental scientists that the accelerating loss of biodiversity—populations (Hughes et al. 1997), species, and communities—should be a matter of great concern. They have concluded that nature must be conserved not just for its own sake but also for the sake of Homo sapiens, to which it supplies an indispensable array of ecosystem services (Daily 1997, Chapin et al. 2000) and products (Beattie and Ehrlich 2001). And for most of those scientists , and large numbers of environmentalists, conservation is a major ethical issue (Rolston 1988, Nash 1989). In addition , the scientific consensus is that the major driving forces of the destruction of humanity's natural capital are population growth, overconsumption, and the use of faulty technologies combined with inappropriate socio-political-economic arrangements to service that consumption (Holdren But the seriousness of the environmental dimensions of the human predicament is still unknown to the vast majority of the general public and decisionmakers worldwide. Although scientists understand the general directions in which humanity should be moving to solve its environmental problems, the policy response of society remains pathetic. As a result the cutting edge of the environmental sciences is now moving from the ecological and physical sciences toward the behav-ioral sciences, which seem to have the potential to develop ways to improve that response. The key is finding ways to alter the course of cultural evo-lution—change in the vast body of nongenetic information that humanity possesses and passes around between and within generations (Ehrlich and Holm 1963, Keesing 1974). Cultural evolution in this sense means more than what is usually called " history. " For example, the divergence of languages or the refinement of an aircraft's design is not ordinarily studied by historians, but these are part of cultural evolution. The critical importance of cultural evolution in understanding behavior has been reinforced by the discovery that there may be only some 26,000–38,000 genes in the human genome (Venter et al. 2001). It is now even more obvious that this " gene shortage " (Ehrlich 2000) is the final nail in the coffin of " evo biology of a wide variety of organisms, most notably butterflies, birds, and …