Today, it is widely accepted that the first to conceive the term and the discipline of bioethics was the German theologian and teacher Fritz Jahr from the city of Halle. Without knowing Jahr's ideas, the American oncologist Van Rensselaer Potter from Madison, Wisconsin, invented the notion of bioethics which, unlike in the case of Fritz Jahr, had a deep impact and spread all over the world. Although Jahr's bioethics somehow differed from that of Potter, they did share many crucial aspects, (...) one of which was their globality. Without explicit reference to it, nevertheless, Fritz Jahr's “globality” was based upon his broad readings including Far-Eastern sources and thinkers, while Van Rensselaer Potter explicitly formed his global bioethics, in the late 1980s, as a reaction to the narrowing-down of his earlier ideas. In that way, Jahr and Potter, like on many other points, came to the same result via different motives and pathways. (shrink)

The authors introduce and make an attempt to describe the main problems that present and future populations of the underdeveloped world will be facing to provide enough food for themeselves. This essay describes the anachronistic situation where underdeveloped countries grow, with big deal of economical efforts, agricultural products that eventually will be used to grow and feed cattle whose meat does constitutes the principal component of the western world diet. Should this practice be reduced, underdeveloped countries will be able to (...) provide food for themeselves in large quantities. Ironically, meat diet and overfeeding, lead to a number of disease like overweight, heart attack which may lead to death. With the abnormal and speculative increase of oil price and with the “save the world from pollution” philosophy, farmers were induced, hoping to make more profit from their work, to turn their agricultural production into product which will be used to make ecological fuel like Ethanol, retrieving, by doing so, a lot of land and products from the food market. (shrink)

Adaptive success and evolution are determined by how we interact with the natural environment and all other forms of life. Yet in our pursuit to dominate the natural world, we have lost sight of this basic premise and continue to exploit natural resources, to contaminate, to consume more than necessary and to misuse our reproductive capacities. For this reason, global bioethics emerged in the 1980s, a culmination of mental resistance on the part of many observers who sought to readdress the (...) balance between humankind and nature – a balance which must be reinstated if we are to survive. Corrective measures are required, which should be free from purely religious or political influences because their ideologies are frequently founded on strategies of power, with little regard for the general well-being of all living species. Global bioethics, as opposed to bioethics, was formulated by myself, Van Rensselaer Potter, Antonio Moroni, Laura Westra and others, to transcend the restraints of science, uniting it with the humanities to create a new expanded consciousness, an alliance between life and the environment in which all factors – environmental, biological, physical, psychological, social and economic – recognize that they are inderdependent. (shrink)

This paper presents the results of the Symposium on “Deforestation and reforestation: The Atlas Project”. From the studies presented appeared that at present the causes od deforestation do not arise so much from global climatic causes, but rather from human activity. Both the study conducted on the Nokopo population in Papua New Guinea, by Kocher Schmid, and the one conducted on the Berbers in Morocco, by Camperio Ciani and Arhou, presented a clear role of the local population and its tradition (...) on negatiove forerst iòpact. Agro-forestal grazing and clearing for domestic animal feeding produced heavy forest degeneration. In Morocco the role of mixed herds of a few goats with many sheep produce devastating effects to the undergrowth of the Cedar and Oak forest. While fires ang pig overgrazing produce deforestation in the Nokopo Primary forest region. Further the external impact of foreign culture negatively affects the dinamic relationship between the local culture and the forest environment. The desertification process that emerges is a bottom up one that begins from the undergrowth reduction and ends with tha actual felling of the tree. It is suggested that close monuitoring of the forest condition using biological indicators could be a useful inyegration to remote sensing methods. As an example Macaca sylvanus demography has proven an efficient biological indicator to individuate early forest desertification risks in Morocco. It is proposed the Atlas project that combines reforestation with an efficient monitoring system and the study and development of sustainable alternatives to overgrazing to reduce the desertification process of the last North Africa forest. (shrink)

A comprehensive analysis of the evolving conditions that provided for the emergence and autonomization of the field of bioethical inquiry, as well as the social, cultural and political background against which its birth can be set, should enlighten us about the problematic nature that characterises it from its very onset. Those conditions are: abuses in experimentation on human subjects, availability of new biomedical technologies, the challenging of prevalent medical paradigms and the ultimate meaning and purpose of medical care, new scientific (...) and social fields of concern dealing with ecology and environmental health, genetic engineering and biotechnologies, demographics, behavioural manipulation, reproductive medicine, etc., the upsurge of social movements raising issues of medical importance, and the need for an ethics for the technological age. The scope and meaning of bioethics is best defined by the overriding questions that open up the field of both theoretical and practical bioethical inquiry rather than by the individual responses given to such questions by the most prominent spokesmen in bioethics. (shrink)