From Western to Asian Environmental Ethics Essay example

The global population is expected to reach 9 billion people by the year 2050 and scientific projections indicate that world is on a trajectory towards an environmental and global food crisis. World Leaders, environmental enthusiasts and aid agencies have cause for alarm as they support urgent policies for change, for without them mankind will face unprecedented food insecurity. In 2015 estimates were that there were “some 795 million people” [World Food Programme, 2015], experiencing food insecurity and 3.1 million children under 5 died through malnutrition, while Australians continue to waste an estimated 361 Kg’s of food per person per yr [PMSEIC, 2010, p.44] All the while the earth groans under the weight of Greenhouse Gas Emissions [GHG], deforestation, soil degradation and

Environmental scanning can be viewed as a way of acquiring information about outside events that can aid organizations in first identifying potential trends, then interpreting them

Environmental degradation is a fact that has pervaded through every aspect of human life. But strangely enough, it is human beings who are responsible for such tragic environmental deteriorations. Human beings, through their peculiar habits and thoughtless actions have brought about dilemmas for themselves. It is the human actions which have put the environment and ecology in danger. But human beings have not taken any lesson from the environmental degradations as it seems because even today large corporations are contributing thoroughly to the deteriorating conditions of human life. Food, which is the primary mode of survival, is yet another aspect which has been made the target of human indifference – an indifference which is costing a myriad

The earths resources are finite and we are very close to meeting the earths carrying capacity. We created the era of a constant want and desire for material products which has created the concept of supply and demand; which inevitably led to corporations to go multinational, also known as transitional companies. These transitional companies are what have created sweat shops in third world countries therefore we are not only destroying our own resources to fill this supply and demand, we are also creating an idea of power and dominance over ourselves which has ultimately led to economic disparity. We should be trying to salvage our resources and share amongst ourselves of whatever we have left, not using everything until it’s gone and leaving people better off than others. This constant want and desire for materialistic items has blinded us, forgetting every time we create a phone or a laptop we are taking from the earth and what we are taking can not be replenished.

Often in an individual’s life they run into situations or events that prevent them from obtaining the services and products that they need and/or desire. For instance, every year American citizens are turned away from hospitals, doctor’s offices, and pharmacies, unable to get an annual influenza vaccine. Recent gun legislation in the United States has created ammunition stockpiling within gun owners. (LoveToKnow, Corp., 2015) Furthermore the recent El Nino has created a heated debate on which California farms will get sufficient water this year. Each of the aforementioned examples illustrates how the scarcity of products and services can result in serious consequences (social, health, economic, and political) in the Unites States and model similar conditions globally. Around the world, clean water, food, fossil fuels, minerals, and other natural resources have developed limited availability or reached scarce status due to the demands of the growing human population. As the world’s population and demands to raise the quality of life grows exponentially, it is the ethical and moral task of the global community to define, implement, and educate the world on sustainable practices to prevent scarcity and limited availability that can hinder economic, environmental, and political progress of the global society presently and in the future.

“Population will inevitably and completely outstrip whatever small increases in food supplies we make. The death rate will increase until at least 100-200 million people per year will be starving to death during the next ten years.”- Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University biologist

“When we have peace, then we have a chance to save the planet. But if we are not united in peace, if we do not practice mindful consumption, we cannot save our planet.”(Thich Nhat Hanh) We as the human race have entered a new age of the Earth: the Anthropocene, a term that became popular in the early 2000s. It means “ Man New”, because of the new world we have created and the amount of extinctions, pollution and alterations in the world’s functions that has come from our expansion. Due to the large amount of waste a small portion of the world produces, it affects the whole world in terrifying ways. People that argue that overpopulation is the largest issue have to understand that it is not the majority of the world that creates so much waste

There are billions of people struggling every day to have enough to eat, and billions of tons of food being tossed in the garbage, food waste is gaining increasing awareness as a serious environmental and economic issue. Research shows that about 60 million metric tons of food is wasted a year in the United States, with an estimated value of $162 billion. About 32 million tons of it end up in landfills, at a cost of about $1.5 billion a year to local government this economic crisis is worldwide! My research estimates that a third of all the food produced in the world is never consumed, and the total cost of that food waste could be as high as $400 billion a year. The food discarded by retailers and consumers in the most developed countries would be more than enough to feed all of the world’s hungry people, but it is not just those countries that have problems with food waste, it is also an issue in African countries like South Africa. The problem is expected to grow worse as the world’s population increases, unless actions are taken to reduce the waste. Food waste is not only a social cost, but it contributes to growing environmental problems like global warming, experts say, with the production of food consuming vast quantities of water, fertilizer and land. The fuel that is burned to process, refrigerate and transport it also adds to the environmental cost. Most food waste is thrown away in landfills, where it decomposes and emits methane, a potent greenhouse gas.

Year after year, natural resources are drastically being consumed. Some of the radical results of having a consumer-based economy in the United States are having less than 4% of original forests, 40% drinkable waterways, as well as consuming 30% of the world’s resources while the United States only has 5% of the world’s population. For further success in our country as well as in the world, we shouldn’t have a consumer-based economy with finite resources to consume due to the fact that resources are being wasted, pollution is continuously growing in the air that we breathe, and toxins affect our well-being as humans.

The inspiration for environmental ethics was the first Earth Day in 1970 when environmentalists started urging philosophers who were involved with environmental groups to do something about environmental ethics. An intellectual climate had developed in the last few years of the 1960s in large part because of the publication of two papers in Science: Lynn White's "The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis" (March 1967) and Garett Hardin's "The Tragedy of the Commons" (December 1968). Most influential with regard to this kind of thinking, however, was an essay in Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac, "The Land Ethic," in which Leopold explicitly claimed that the roots of the ecological

Throughout time, Westerners have more or less oppressed Eastern culture, creating the west as the metaphysical head of the world. The west’s ethnocentric tendencies, have acted as a suppressant to the spread of non-western thought. Even though Eastern ideologies tend to differ greatly from thoughts of the western world, there is some level of unity between the two. Unlike the ecclesiastical influences, seen in the west, Confucianism and Sikhi present thoughts about the individual and humankind’s natural goodness. In many cases of political and social order, Eastern and Western philosophy have found themselves parallel in thought.

Ethics is the study of what is right and wrong in human conduct. Environmental ethics studies the effects of human’s moral relationships on the environment and everything within it (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2008). The ethical principles that govern those relations determine human duties, obligations, and responsibilities with regard to the Earth’s natural environment and all of the animals and plants that inhabit it (Taylor, 1989). The purpose of this paper is to reveal environmental issues that are threatening the existence of life on Earth, and discus our social obligations to refrain from further damaging our environment, health and life for future generations. I will discus the need for appropriate actions and the ethical

Environmental problems are something which belongs to nature or known as “Mother Earth” [13]. Nature was created to help people survive from gathering foods until build a house. This phenomenon happens continuously without thinking how much damage that nature has because human’s fault. Nature gradually becomes worse and animal’s life in danger. People who are aware of the importance of nature react. Those people do several ways to save the environment. Although these efforts can return back the environment, these efforts only can be hold temporarily. This problem happens because those people who are aware of the environment only slightly; for remaining, there are people either do not know or do not care about the nature. People’s efforts

According to Mintzberg, the environmental school of thought is a strategy dealing with the forces outside the organization. Unlike the other schools in his book, Strategy Safari, the environment plays a central role in the strategy formation process alongside leadership and the organization where the organization becomes subordinate to the external environment. The environmental school assumptions are that during the formative period of the organization the company shapes itself in response to the environment, but after that period is increasingly unable to respond to the environment. Moreover, the organization long term survival depends on the early choices made during its formative period. Over time, Mintzberg states, leadership becomes

In the United States, we consume more energy from oil than from any other energy source. In 2014 the total amount of petroleum consumed in the United States was about 19 million barrels per day. As we look into making the world a more eco friendly environment, I ask the question; what are some alternatives of oil and the effects of the alternative.