The environment is something that most people would agree, needs to be protected. The lives that we have grown accustomed to and may take fro granted may be in danger. This is the world we live in and the abuse or misuse of our ecosystem could have consequences for years to come. There are some that believe that the world’s intended purpose was to serve us as human beings in living comfortable lives, this is called the anthropocentric perspective. Environmental issues are nothing new and have come a long way with more and more people backing the protection of or ecology. I’ll be going through a brief history, current events on oil consumption, and my thought on the anticipated future of what we call environmental issues.
In 1970 the first Earth Day was held and this had an immense role in the movement of environmental ethics. The questioning of how our relationship with the earth maybe causing a negative effect also started becoming a major concern mostly due to a well known philosopher’s writings. Lynn White published two major publications that really began the interest of others in the environment. From this concern, stemmed the idea for an ethical approach to our ecology. Environmentalists started the movement of persuading well known philosophers that were in evolved in some sort of environmental groups to assist them in the movement of environmental ethics. .
If we were created in God’s image and the earth is meant for us to utilize to our benefit then is it possible to take advantage of it? In the Judeo-Christian theory human beings always maintain superiority over all other forms of life, as published in White’s 1967 essay. (White 1967) This sense of thinking is considered to be anthropocentric, which is when human beings are given a greater sense of intrinsic value over non-human things and the preservation of human life is justified even at the expense of non-human organisms. This way of thinking is very much still in play in our recent...