Revisiting industrial ecology and environmental ethics

Since the late 1960s, growing awareness and public interest on environmental issues led to actions by governments and industries, establishing an expanding range of instruments for nature protection. Yet, patterns of industrial production and consumption remained widely unsustainable, causing local pollution, resource depletion, climate change and the extensive loss of habitat and biodiversity. Evident damages of environments, physical sufferings, public discontent with traditional industrial and social processes and the awareness that human actions can cause a global disaster, created the obligation to change attitudes as well as operations towards the environment. The inherent task of this obligation - finding an appropriate balance between the development of industrial cultures and the conditions of natural surroundings - inspired new approaches to improve industrial systems in technological civilizations, industrial ecology being amongst them.

The industrial ecology program at NTNU started in 1996, and my first visit to the Centre for Environment and Development (SMU) at NTNU took place in Spring 1997.At that time, I was writing my doctoral dissertation at the Centre for Development and Environment (SUM) in Oslo with Arne Næss as my external supervisor. Næss told me to visit Trondheim since a promising program was emerging there, I met Helge Brattebø and Kjetil Røine and ´the rest is history`. Working with environmental ethics in my research, I related IE features to this topic and the following text presents a back glance of this work.

IE has been developed by engineers and natural scientists and hence ethics in the concept remain vague, such as the goal of harmonizing the nature and culture dichotomy with scientific expertise, appropriate technology, and socio-economic management (Keitsch and Isenmann, 2003). Nevertheless, IE is a promising concept with the potential to methodologically couple the question of what is possible to achieve and how, with the question what is worth to achieve and why. One connection between IE and environmental ethics (EE) lies in the systems approach and its principles of interdependence, diversity, and complexity, which are in this contribution associated to ethical principles of responsibility, openness, and correspondence.

A system is generally defined as a set of interdependent parts that internally perform functions which overcome their individual limitations. Functions are enacted via established pathways (e.g., nature processes, economic routines, political decisions, social codes etc.) within a system structure. Functions can also create new pathways and modify the existing structures (Bertalanffy, 1968). Systems evolve by becoming more complex and ´intelligent´. Complex systems are purposefully relating multiple performances to improving the overall outcome. Designing a complex wastewater recycling system might be less efficient than implementing a single action in a particular case, for instance just to release the sewage into a Fjord, but it might be more efficient in achieving overall waste reduction (Keitsch et al., 1999).

The most sustainable systems are diverse, complex, and open. Open systems interact with their surroundings while maintaining their distinctiveness. For example, some socio-cultural systems disappeared when people migrated to escape climate change, while other systems managed to maintain traditional practices and beliefs in a novel structure such as changed agriculture practices that adapted to climate change. The environmental crisis necessitates many societies to transform practices, for example to shift from conventional industries to environmentally adjusted, systematized industries. Table 1 below illustrates transitions from a traditional industrial society that multiplies human muscle (1st generation), to super industrial production processes resulting in the environmental crisis (2nd generation), towards a knowledge-based society intensifying human awareness and actions towards sustainability values (3rd generation).

In the following, I will present a brief introduction to Ecological or environmental ethics (EE). EE is a part of bioethics, which also includes animal ethics, medicine ethics, and gene ethics. EE is divided in biocentrism and anthropocentrism. Roughly, nature protection in biocentrism relates to the intrinsic (self) value of life, anthropocentrism relates nature protection to human values. Biocentrism claims that every being exists in an ecological system, and all are dependent on each other. Even complex beings, like humans, cannot exist without this system, and insofar humans are part of nature. The ethical obligation for humans is to protect the right of every being to survive and mature.

Anthropocentrism perceives that only human beings are morally significant because they can think, decide and act consciously. The natural environment is crucial for human well-being and survival, so humans have an indirect duty towards the environment, that is, a duty that is derived from their interests. This involves keeping the earth environmentally hospitable for supporting human life, and conserving beauty and resources, so human life on earth continues to be liveable. Environmental duties may derive both from the immediate benefit, which living people receive from the environment, and the benefit that future generation of people will receive. Normatively relevant is here that the environment is conceived as human’s lifeworld for current as well as for further generations. Conventional ethics in IE stem from the sustainable development anthropocentrism, mainly utilitarianism (the best for all) and ethics of justice (universal fairness). In my view, IE is however also a candidate for moderate biocentrism.

Logically, humans are always both ´part of nature´ and ´apart from nature´ (also called ´culture-nature gap´). However, accepting the intrinsic value of nature heuristically, which is not the case in anthropocentrism, allows to move beyond human dominance of nature. To explain this more detailed, I associate systems principles: interdependence, diversity, and complexity with corresponding ethical values: responsibility, openness and correspondence. According to Capra (1995), interdependence acknowledges that all members of an ecosystem are part of a vast and intricate network of relationships, andthat all depend on each other for continued survival. In ethics, interdependence relates to human actions instead of ecosystem performances. In 1990 Apel coined the term ‘Macroethics,’ claiming that accumulated human activities can result in a global environmental crisis, and that hence the interdependence of human actions needs collective responsibility:

“The most difficult problem in this context appears to be changing our scientific technology and our market based economic system in such a way that their efficiency and power of motivation are not destroyed but rather put into service of a sustainable way of human life .” (Apel, 1990, 225).

A distinction between interdependence in natural systems and in social systems lies in purpose setting. The purpose of an ecosystem is to maintain its wholeness, for example an organism, while a social system historically redefines and enacts multiple purposes. To reconcile this contrast, Apel couples scientific understanding of nature with a phenomenological interpretation of nature as human lifeworld. Experiencing attachment to other living beings strengthens the development of a collective responsibility, including non-human nature. This necessitates two other systems principles: diversity and complexity.

Diversity signifies dissimilarities of system components. In ecosystems, diversity indicates for example a variety of existing species or physical characteristics of an environment. Diversity in a social system relates for example to multiple cultures and perspectives from various stakeholders. Habermas (1988) discusses diversity by applying the universal principle of the ´unforced force´ of the better argument. The ethical basis for diversity and openness is that different stakeholders perform discourses and make decisions, while all lifestyles and opinions are considered. This means that, ideally, all are treated equally in a discourse, regardless their religion, gender, personal beliefs etc., and the question of power is irrelevant. Practically, openness allows asking first after common goals and how single participants or groups may contribute to achieve them, instead of using individual interests as an onset. Openness allows the position: What the others are saying could be right! Thereby it signifies a potential for expanding ways of seeing a certain problem and enlarge the frame for solutions.For Habermas, openness is firstly a logical condition of the real variety of opinions in a discourse and secondly an ethical attitude - admiration of the variety of beliefs and willingness to find compromises.

Discussing relationships between IE, a systems approach and environmental ethics, the body, experiences, and emotions provide further valuable insights, which supplement rational decision-making. Environmental degradation is not only affecting outer nature, but results in growing health problems, unhappiness with the state of natural surroundings, and doubts if there is enough space and food for humanity. Regarding solutions for the future, Dryzek (1990) criticized the strong focus on rational problem solving and the lack of thematising bodily experiences in the sustainability debate:

“Although it is easy to forget, our communications with one another can proceed only in and through the media made available by the natural world... Communicative rationality as generally stated (e.g. by Habermas) is not, however, conductive to harmonious relationships with the natural world. A first defect arises from its transcendent, ahistorical learnings. In practice, all ecological contexts are different, and individuals are likely to interpret and experience them in different ways. (1990, p.205, 203).

According to Dryzek, the discussion of ethical and sustainability values should value individual states of wellbeing as equally important as rational statements. While ecological complexity relates to a biotic community and its environment, social complexity relates among others to the human ability to correspond with nature in different ways - rationally, instrumentally, emotionally, creatively and spiritually. Within the same line of thought, Næss` Deep Ecology assumes a kinship between all living beings:

“To the ecological field worker, the equal right to live and blossom is an intuitively clear and obvious value axiom. Its restriction to humans is an anthropocentrism with detrimental effects upon the life quality of humans themselves. This quality depends in part upon deep pleasure and satisfaction we receive from close partnership with other forms of life. The attempt to ignore our dependence and to establish a master-slave role has contributed to the alienation of man from himself.” (Næss1989, 27, 28).

Næss adopts a systems approach and claims that without a cooperation between nature and humans, there is no possibility for a good life. Besides the political engagement, the personal development towards an ecological self is crucial. We study eco-philosophy and perhaps we are environmental activists, but it is also important to develop one’s own ecosophy. Ecosophy as self-realization means for Næss identification with the ecological self and includes helpfulness and compassion with other beings. Næss does not believe in an ethical code, but in understanding and identifying with nature as motivation for ecological actions.

The joy, when experiencing nature’s ‘Gestalt’ allows identification with other living beings. Every organism is part of a whole, but it is only by experiencing the Gestalt and through leading a life based on this awareness that one can open new dimensions. Næss’ Gestalt ontology opens a possibility for a moderate biocentrism that is not based on sciences such as physics or biology as other biocentric approaches, but on phenomenology, considering everyday experiences, aesthetic perceptions and expressive and creative communication about sustainable ways of living. Considering experiences of natural surroundings in EE, this means to embrace complex, various, and entangled ways of human interaction with nature and provide different views on nature than just instrumental or scientific ones.

Conclusively, industrial ecology has a biocentric, ethical potential that is hardly thematized, even if the concept deals with a range of values while investigating areas such as cleaner technologies, sustainable energy use, education and training, finance and investment, policy and regulation, green marketing, and eco-design etc. The industrial ecology community is held together by shared views and norms with regards to values of preservation of natural and cultural environments (Keitsch and Opoku 2006). Since IE is pluralistic, it allows several ethics perspectives related to the specific areas. From my point of view, successful responses to the environmental crisis can be reached by adapting systems principles methodologically in IE. Systems thinking allows various perspectives and advocates diverse nature interpretations.The holistic and comparative systems approach of the IE concept further facilitates for interdisciplinary collaboration of different stakeholders. Regarding humans as perpetrator of the environmental crisis and as animale rationabile - able in this case to find ways out of this crisis - IE seems not only to comprise new fields of studies, but also allows the inspection of values and perceptions guiding our decisions how to live now and in the future.

REFERENCES

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BERTALANNFY, L.V. (1968) General Systems Theory, Development, Applications.George Braziller: New York.

CAPRA, F., PAULI, G. (eds.) (1995).Steering business toward sustainability. United Nations University Press: Tokyo, New York, Paris.

DRYZEK,J. (1990) Green Reason: Communicative Ethics for the Biosphere. Environmental Ethics, Vol.12, Fall 1990, Denton, Texas.

HABERMAS, J. (1990), Moral consciousness and communicative action. MIT Press: Cambridge Mass.

KEITSCH, M., HERMANSEN, J., ØFSTI, A. (1999). Sustainable wastewater management based on the concept of industrial ecology. Tapir: Trondheim.

KEITSCH, M., ISENMANN, R. (2003). Industrial Ecology: a philosophically focused appraisal. Business Strategy and the Environment Conference, 15-16 September, Stamford Hall, University of Leicester, UK 2003, p.72-84.

KEITSCH, M., OPOKU, H. (2006). Une approche objective de la durabilité? in: Théorie des implications scientifiques et politiques de l’écologie industrielle, Ecologie et Politique, n°32/2006, Paris,ISBN:2-84950-084-4, ISSN:1166-3030.

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