soil-conservation-people-religion-and-land.pdf - South West NRM

a constraint on our freedom of action in our effort to
survive. In philosophical terms, our social ethics have
distinguished social from anti-social behaviour. The need for
such a distinction arises from the requirement to live
together - the biologistsF symbiosis. Thus our political and
economic systems represent structured cooperative mechanisms
for evolution.
The paramount question when identifying a sound ethical basis
is whether we view "nature", on one hand, and "human societytq
on another, as distinct realms with a dichotomy between them,
or whether we see them as different aspects of the same
system. The former view leads to q'conservationll and
lqdevelopmentlv being seen as opposed with continual "tradeoff
sf' necessarily resulting. This view appears to have
dominated the debate in Australia to date, with the
unproductive polarization between llconservationistsl~ and
vqdevelopmentalistsqt ensuing. There are signs that the latter
view is now beginning to be taken seriously.
"Nature should not be viewed simply as a pristine wilderness
to be revered, nor only as a quarry to be exploited, despite
the fact that both of these perspectives have their advocates.
An enlightened, ethical' basis for environmental legislation,
which would also be consistent with our cultural heritage,
would view nature as a fertile garden to be nurtured and
cultivated by human beings" (OrConnor, 1986).
The earliest ethics dealt with relations between individuals,
later between groups, and in some eastern cultures, between
people and Nature. In the West however, we have never broken
away from the assumption that Nature is there for our use.
This, we have agreed, is Nature's raison dretre. Leopold
points out that we have developed no ethic toward the land or
toward the plants and animals that grow on it. He points out
that this deficiency stems from our view of land as a
possession and compares our rape of the earth to the ancient
Greek Odysseus who slayed all his slave-girls because they too
were simply another lot of possessions in that society. So
too our modern Australian relation to the land has been
strictly economic, having privileges without obligations.
Though even in Ezekiel and lsaiahJs time they regarded land
the greenhouse effect on our survival, the ecological
imperative of nurturing the ecosystems we depend on has become
a sine qua non for humankind.