Ecological Concerns: Environmental Sustainability

INTRODUCTION TO VOLUME V

In this volume, the articles address the human impact on the environment ever since the beginning of the Anthropocene. With industrialisation and the rapid developments in its wake, the changes have been increasingly unsustainable and endangered all life on earth. Unfettered economic growth, the increasing levels of consumption, the production of unmanageable waste, the loss of biodiversity, and catastrophic climate change urgently require not just to be contained at sustainable levels, but to be reversed to regenerative ones before we reach a tipping point of no return. This demands more than new technologies. It makes a change mind-set imperative. CLICK TO READ MORE…

We must develop a worldview that considers ourselves as a part of the ecological system, not apart from and outside of it. From Pope Francis’s Laudato Si (2015) to Amitava Ghosh’s The Great Derangement (2018) the imperative for such a critical worldview has now been recognised, and a legally binding international agreement attempted (UNFCCC, Paris 21 COP). However, equity is an international response that would require the wealthier nations to take responsibility proportionate to their historical contribution to the crisis, as also to their commensurate to their present means available. And there’s the rub! We seem to forget we all have ‘only one earth; share and care’. (Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in 1992)

The recent UN conference in Glasgow on climate change has pointed to new urgencies, but we must follow through with new and more generous commitments. Or else we will leave the future to inherit a world beyond the point of no return, plagued with environmental disasters and ecological breakdown. The essays here add up to appeal, especially to richer nations in solidarity with the poorer ones, to anticipate and overcome such a future.

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Ecological Concerns: Environmental Sustainability

LIST OF ARTICLES WITH ABSTRACTS IN VOLUME V

1. Towards an Ecological Consciousness: Religious, Ethical and Spiritual Perspectives 

Abstract: The three essential dimensions of a religious understanding of ecology. These can be put together in the cosmotheandric perspective, where human fellowship, cosmic evolution and divine in-dwelling make up the integrated vision of total reality. After a brief sketch of creation, redemption, and monastic spiritualities, the scattered fragments of insight and institution are collected within a cosmotheandric synthesis.

2. An Eco-Sensitive Spirituality For Today

Abstract: This tries to examine spiritual responses to the environment and the ecological crisis. After a brief sketch of creation, redemption, and monastic spiritualities, the scattered fragments of insight and institution are collected within a cosmotheandric synthesis.

3. Eco-Ethics for an Eco-Crisis:A Third World Perspective on Global Warming and Climate Change

Abstract: This paper is in two parts: the first more generally will underline the need for an eco-ethic for an in-depth response to the present crisis, and then go on to sketch some of the basic features of a worldview that would underpin the need for such an ethic, as also the foundational values and community norms on which it must be built, and the rituals and myths that might sustain it. The second part will more particularly deal with the ethical implications of the environmental issues involved in the potential fallout from anthropogenic global warming: the burden of risk and the price of change; equity-led ecological development; inter-generational responsibility; environmental and financial debt; and environmental rights and ecological duties.

4. Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam: Transition to an Ecological Community

Abstract:  To address the environmental crisis,  we need to reverse the negative impact the human community is having on the ecological one. Peace in our human community is the necessary condition for peace with the ecological one. The pursuit of a universal family, as expressed by the mantra Vasudhaiva Kutumbakum demands, can only be viable and holistic from such a social-ecological perspective. 

5. Ecocide or Eco-ethic?

Abstract: The Rio summit showed the Machiavellian primacy of politics over ethics. Our response to the ecological crisis must find a social expression that effectively impinges on, and restructures our society.