Ecology and the claims for a science-based ethics

Alfred Tauber

pp. 185-206

in: Robert S. Cohen, Alfred Tauber (eds), Philosophies of nature: the human dimension, Berlin, Springer, 1998

Abstract

Erazim Kohák loves the forest. He spends much of his leisure there, and he has written eloquently of it as a paradigm of nature, specifically searching for an ethics based on our relation to nature. He seeks to ascribe meaning to Nature. How is Nature itself, and especially our relation to it, meaningful to us, and perhaps more importantly, what is our responsibility to Nature. Our age has witnessed an increasing insularity from the natural world. Both individually and as a culture, we spend a large part of our national fortune on dissecting natural phenomena in order to control nature for our purported economic and social welfare, and the technological product of that endeavor has had a tremendous price. Erazim has been an important voice in attempting to assess that cost, a powerful witness to how we must still account for a humane philosophy of nature even as we recede from it in the guise of controller.

Cited authors

Kohák Erazim