Empathy.

An individual’s perspective on the environment and how they relate to it can have a significant impact on the way they make economic decisions, the way they vote, and the way they just go about their daily life. While there are many different environmental perspectives, these perspectives can be primarily categorized in one of two ways: human-centered or life/earth-centered. People with human-centric, or anthropocentric, views believe that the needs and desires of humans are more important than those of other species. Furthermore, within this worldview is the belief that humans rightly dominate the planet and exert control over other species because we are more intelligent and resourceful. Within this human-centric worldview category, there are a few prominent subcategories. One school of thought views our planet as ‘spaceship-earth’: our machine that we are floating in space on and can understand and control. When it comes to environmental problems, there are those in the ‘no-problem’ school of thought who think that any disturbance or devastation we cause to the planet can be solved with new technological advancements and innovative methods of operation. Those in the ‘free-market’ school believe that such problems will be solved through the method of privatizing everything and allowing unregulated trade between self-interested parties to occur. Some human-centric thinkers believe that we need to be stewards to the planet because they feel an ethical obligation to do so. Those who do not have an anthropocentric view on the world are said to have an ‘environmental wisdom’ worldview. While there are many facets to these types of views, the principle and uniting factor is the recognition of humanity as one species within an interconnected biological network of millions of other species that is not in control of the planet but rather subject to natural laws and forces just as any other species. There are many societal, cultural, and historical factors that affect the formation of one’s environmental worldview. For many, the adoption of a personal environmental worldview may not have even been a conscious decision (I myself was not aware I had one until I started thinking about it as a senior in high school); I encourage those unsure about their worldview to think about their values and personal visions of the future when trying to decide which schools of thought they gravitate towards.

Within the realm of environmental philosophies there are questions of ethics and justice regarding humanity’s relationship to the planet. When it comes to environmental ethics, there are those that emphasize intragenerational human justice by taking part in the Environmental Justice Movement (EJM). People in this movement do regard the environment as a separate entity from humanity but rather understand it as anywhere one lives, works, or recreates. This movement has roots in and is still largely led by grass-roots organizers who help their communities who are dealing with various environmental injustices such as being exposed to pollution and toxins and being removed from culturally important natural areas. While much of this movement manifests as local groups dealing with local problems, increased globalization has led to the development of a global environmental justice movement in which the Global South demands due justice from the Global North whose overconsumption of natural resources (largely extracted from regions in the South) causes and exacerbates the South’s environmental degradation. With environmental justice, there are some who emphasize the importance of intergenerational human justice as well. These people believe that we in the present have a duty to future generations of people to pass on a planet to them that is life-supporting and healthy. Therefore, many hold the position that today’s governments should establish rules and regulations that prevent today’s people from using up too much of the planet’s natural resources and from polluting the air, land, and water to an irreversibly damaged level that would prevent future people from using them in the ways that we currently enjoy. One reason why such reasoning has not amounted to many actual policies yet is because critics of this way of thinking beg the following question: To what extent do possible future people have rights (let alone the right to a livable future planet)? Some argue that since these people do not exist yet, we could not possibly have a social contract with them or any moral obligations to them. There are some libertarians who think that future people will certainly have some negative rights (for example, the right to not be assaulted) which can be protected by the law, but that the right to a livable planet is a positive right and therefore cannot be protected by the law. Some liberals, including John Rawls who to some have written the most well-established argument for intergenerational justice, believe that we need to establish institutions that deal with laws regarding future people and once we do that it will be a solved problem. There are communitarians who believe that we need to extend our thoughts about community to involve the people in future generations. However, this idea is quite limited as for many it leads them to only think in the near future and about their own community rather than about the world as a whole. Some people, including myself, think that we need to extend our conception of a community not temporally but in regard to other species. These people have a ‘land ethic’ which was explained by Aldo Leopold in 1949. Leopold claims that: “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include the soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” With this interspecific justice lense, humans are viewed as members of a biotic team rather than as ruler of the land. We must appreciate, respect, and even love the land we live our lives on in order to live well and ensure that other beings around us can also prosper. For many people this perspective can be difficult to grasp given that an anthropocentric view of the world is common in many modern societies, but I encourage people to ponder the validity of Leopold’s ideas and think about how much their lives depend on the health of their land; I hope they will appreciate it more after doing so.

There are also some people who think we need to increase the amount of environmental education and nature exposure people get while in the education system (both in the realms of required and higher education). While I do think that this would certainly lead to an increase in the amount of people interested in environmental academics and might lead people to want to live more sustainably, I do think that without a worldview change that results in a person having more empathy (for humans, future humans, and non-humans alike) without overthinking the logic of it, then the educational changes could be insufficient as an attempt to revolutionize humanity’s relationship with the rest of this planet. Word Count: 1148

How can we encourage more empathy in our daily lives?