Values are basic ideas.....

VALUES ARE BASIC IDEAS that guide us in how we should behave. We humans acts on instinct most of the time, just like nonhuman animals. We seek food, protection, and sex without having to stop and think about these goals. If we lacked such instinctive strategies of actions, surviving would require constant rethinking and decision-making. But we are also capable, through language, of making rulkes about what we do and why we do it. Wether we recognize it or not, all individual humans and all human cultures possess such rules, or values. The Golden Rule, "Do unto others as you would have done unto you," expresses the value of behaving in ways that recognize and support interdependence. In some form, it is found in all of the world's religions. But values can clash with ecological reality. The idea that all other species are here soley for the good of humans, though contradicted by a weath of scientific evidence and practical experience, is still a widespread if often unacknowledged value.

Values can conflict with each other. Take for example, the value that an important part of being alive is to experience, understand, and enjoy nature. Honoring this value, we would preserve wilderness for our children and others future. But this value directly opposes a value at the root of much economic thinking that the primary goal of humans is to maximize their indivudual welfare, usually monetarily--for instance, when owners cut down ancient wilderness forests to make profits from lumber.

Value conflicts occur within a person as well as between people, though we don't always want to acknowledge such conflicts. People requently say we want both low taxes and generous government servises, or both protection of natural areas and freedom to do whatever we want in them-- even though they they may realize deep down that they can't have both at the same time.

The environmental movement is fundamentally based not on economic or scientific arguements but on moral and aesthetic values about what is right, fitting, beautiful, or satisfying. While conflicts over environmental issues are often argued on "practical" grounds, most environmental debates ultimately involve value conflicts. Some fundamentalists believe that the end of the world will come soon, so it really doesnt matter if we humans cause terrible damage to the biosphere. people who believ that all animals have rights hold that human beings are wrong to eat animals, to keep them in cages, or to do damaging medical experiments on them. Ecologically oriented citizens believe that we have a moral obligation to achieve sustainability, so that we do not diminish the chance for future generations to meet their needs. Some economists believe that we can trust the working of economic laws to replace used up resources and solve pollution problems.

Such conflicting views can seem hopelessly at odds. However, there is often a possibility of mutual understanding and cooperations if we realize that although values exist inside our heads, they have consequences in the real world. We all share the consequences of value-based decisions. Religious people generally believe that their values are justified by religious texts or by the decisions of their chruches, yet they can sometimes work with nonreligious people who feel that their values are justified by science-- if both sides are willing to talk about the results of policy decisions. You often gain a new perspective on a value if you see what its concrete consequences are. Sometimes, too, when people talk respectfully together, it turns out that their values are not so far apart as they thought, or they find that they can work together on behalf of one value they share although they disagree on others. continued below.....

 

At some great turning points in history, dominant values become exhausted or problematic, and people work out new values that they hope will enable them to survive better. With the rise of capitolism, Western peoples have adopted the belief that technology can solve all of our problems and is the most important thing in life while religious and cultural matters become secondary. At the moment, many Americans are seking ways to escape the values of expansionist industrialism (embodied in the key idea of growth) and live by new values associated with ecology (embodied in the key idea of sustainability). They don't let the earning and spending of money become their top priority. The dress simply but with flair and eat healthy foods. They focus on activities that have a personal meaning to them, not just status appeal. They are conscienious about recycling, lessing consumption, and generally reducing their impacts.

Transitions in values normally take centuries to work themselves out, through the practical experiences and rethinking of millions of people. This leisurly pace of value change may prove too slow to save us from catastrophes of desertification, deforestation, famine, and disease--brought on by global warming, ozone thinning, overpopulation, and drastic declines in primary productivity in the seas and on land. Thus it is urgent that we do develop a widespread ethic of ecological responsibility."

By Ernest Callenbach

Ecological Literacy - Educating our children for a sustainable world.