Is ethical revitalization the secret of avoiding collapse?

Background/Question/Methods

The most important ethical question facing society and the scientific community today is whether we can prevent the collapse of global civilization in response to today’s “perfect storm” of environmental problems.  The interrelated crises of overpopulation, wasteful consumption, rapidly deteriorating life-support systems, growing economic inequity, widespread hunger and poverty, toxification of the planet, declining resources, an increasing threat of resource wars (especially over oil, gas, and fresh water), a worsening epidemiological environment that enlarges the probability of unprecedented pandemics, and persistent racial, gender, and religious prejudices that make these problems more difficult to solve, represent the greatest challenge ever faced by Homo sapiens.  The urgency of finding answers is signified by the view of many scientists that we may have only a decade to initiate drastic corrective action, that this complex of interrelated problems is unrecognized by the elites who run the world, and that it has not yet generated a global “issue public” around sustainability. 

Results/Conclusions

The  failure to address the increasingly obvious threats from climate disruption alone have clearly shown that scientific knowledge, even if widely presented to the public, can fail to produce adaptive behavioral change.  Therefore environmental scientists should find new ways to communicate the urgent situation to the public, offer practical solutions, and do so in an ethics-focused mode centered on concern for our children and grandchildren.  Ethics are behavioral standards agreed upon by human groups; the challenge now is to very quickly generate a global ethical movement agreeing to change human actions for the benefit of our descendants.  Limited models for such a development might be found in revitalization movements (ghost dances, cargo cults) which often are responses to crises, have prophets (Jim Hansen, Bill McKibben), are anti-colonial (Occupy Wall Street), have millenarian expectations (sustainable society), and include elements of western culture (neoconservatism, environmentalism, “born again” Christianity).   An attempt to promote such a direction can be found in the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere (MAHB, mahb.stanford.edu), which is providing a public forum for generating information, insights, and solutions to the global crisis, enlisting participation by people from diverse communities including NGOs, politics, business, universities, philanthropy, religion, and the media.  This paper will address the unique role that  MAHB plays, and that scholars must increasingly play, in closing the gap between our understanding of the escalating threat of the human predicament and global society’s failure to respond.