Anthropocentrism

While many opponents argue that sustainable energy sources are too expensive, it will cost more money in the future to try and recreate Earth’s services, that are now provided for free. For example, as Suzuki notes, a team of academics at the University of Vermont calculated that nature's services, such as filtering air and water and pollinating plants, would cost 33 trillion dollars annually, while all the world's economies, at the time of the 2004 interview, produced only a little over half of that figure. Therefore, by switching human lifestyle from anthropocentrism to ecocentrism, and doing our part to try to limit our consumption and degradation of the environment, it will save money in the long term. Beginning to save the environment now will also ensure our longevity as a species, allowing us to continue to explore and reach new heights and progress further as a…

One of the common environmental moral dilemmas that are noticed in third world nations are the dialectical assimilation in between anthropocentrism and ecocentrism. Due to some religious and political prejudices some people are taking the upper hand over nature disregarding the nature, plant life and animal life. But at the same time some people believe in nature centered ecological system and give values to all non-human entities regardless of their usefulness to human civilization. In the…

in the creation stories of Genesis, which would entrap and impair the Israelites during the cycle of apostasy and continue to challenge modern day humanity? The nature of the God in the garden who not only created the trees, stated the conditions, and actively pointed out or brought attention to the trees as if to taunt or dare Adam and Eve. Furthermore, a God that would be manipulative and conniving in creating or allowing a supernatural creation (the serpent) to have the access and authority…

that call them home, but to protect the nearby shorelines and ocean floor that the reefs help to protect. One of the other perspectives in environmental ethics is biocentrism which puts value solely on living things (Withgott & Laposata, 2014). This method of thinking would be the next most appropriate viewpoint (in my opinion) for this topic due to the overwhelming amount of life that coral reefs sustain. Coral reefs themselves are living things, so their loss is a direct loss of life. Once…

Imagine walking through an area where you could comfortably breathe the air without worrying about the constant emission of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Now, imagine only being able to breath in this fresh air because American families wanted more financial support in order to pursue needs of their own. Boyce writes “The Carbon Dividend” in The New York Times in order to convey the concern of “broad anthropocentrism” ideals in American society, but more specifically in Amherst,…

Over the course of this unit I have developed many different new ways to look at the environment, and how the things that I do every day can impact the rest of the world, even if I don’t see the impact where I live. I believe that I fall in the Environmental managers underneath Anthropocentrism. Using figure 6 in my syllabus I discovered that an environmental managers are under Anthropocentrism which a people centered way of looking at the world. Most Anthropocentrism is when people are the…

The Paradox of Anthropocentrism In the simplest possible definition, the word evolution is understood as change over time. The notion of evolution, however, more complicated than just the meaning of the word. Conceptually, evolution has dichotomized exceptionally clearly. To the scientific community, evolution is a clear reference to the work and theories completed by Charles Darwin throughout the span of his lifetime, and the modern day knowledge of the process in which organisms develop…

gorilla vs. boy case, biocentrism would value both lives equally. A person using biocentrism would need another standardized set of values like life expectancy to make their ethical choice. Harambe was 17 with a life expectancy of 50 years (Dodley). The boy was three (Dodley) with a life expectancy of 76 years (Life Expectancy). Because the boy has more years to live percentage wise, biocentrism would most likely support killing the gorilla. However, other factors would need to be taken into…

Karl Jaspers’s Axial Age theory explains how our modern human civilization came into existence. It explains why our modern human civilization is deeply rooted in Anthropocentrism, which is the belief that human beings are the crucial, dominant, vital or are the most important species on the planet, basically the center of the world. Lynn White’s arguments discuss how Christianity is behind those values today and one indication is that Christianity has created a divide between us and all other…

Inequality, defined as the “quality of being unequal or uneven,” is one of the only elements of human history that remains constant (Merriam-Webster). It was evident in the various forms of literature produced between the sixteenth and the eighteenth centuries that ranged from Jean De La Fontaine and Bernard Mandeville’s fables to novels by Jonathan Swift and finally to poems by Anna Laetitia Barbauld. Through utilizing anthropomorphized, hyper-rational horses in his novel Gulliver’s Travels,…