Abstract

Environmentalists do not appear to walk their walk as consistently as animal liberationists and anti-abortionists. Are we therefore more hypocritical? Maybe; but there's another explanation. Unlike concern for individual animals or individual fetuses, environmental concerns are holistic —air and waterpollution, species extinction, diminished ecological health and integrity. One pro-life pregnant woman may preserve the life of one unborn baby, the one in her uterus; and one animal liberationist can save the life of one animal, the one he didn't eat. But one environmentalist who refuses to own and operate an automobile has no measurable effect on air pollution. Only collective, social change—universal banning of automobiles, mandatory recycling, etc.—will effectively redress environmental insults. Thus, the best way to put environmental ethics into practice is not to try to do one's bit—retire one's own car, recycle one's own waste—and leave it to every other person to do his or her bit and hope that all such individual environmental ethical acts will aggregate into significance. The best way to put environmental ethics into practice is to work to instill environmental values in society as the foundation for coercive environmental policies, regulations, and laws. The mechanistic-materialistic worldview and its associated consumerist value system trickled down into the collective consciousness via its technological manifestation in a plethora of machines. The systemic worldview in which environmental values are embedded may be communicated to the general public less by means of discursive discourse than by a new generation of systemic-electronic technologies