LYNN WHITE, JR 1907-87.
In: Fifty Key Thinkers on the Environment, 2000-12-07, S. 200-206
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Zugriff:
This article discusses the contribution of Lynn Townsend White Jr. White, an American professor, on environmental thought. White's contribution to environmental thought is represented by the paper, The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis. There are two noteworthy contributions made by White's paper. Understandably the point most people immediately fixated on was White's attack on Christianity. Here, White claimed that Christianity dictated an essentially despotic relationship between humans and the rest of nature--a relationship where technological advance was seen as superlatively virtuous--thus, Christianity is ultimately responsible for the contemporary environmental crisis. It follows that Christianity not only allows for the anthropogenic exploitation of nature that has resulted in our environmental crisis, it also sanctions and enforces it. To solve the environmental crisis, White proposes to rethink Christianity, focus on the possibility of an alternative message about the human-nature relationship, a message of stewardship. The second contribution of White's paper is its assertion to solve the environmental crisis, a rethinking of the old fundamentals and axioms is needed. In other words, man must philosophize. White's entire essay, then, is a call for, and stamp of approval on, the new field of environmental ethics, a subdiscipline of philosophy in its infancy when White's challenge broke. In fact, because of this essentially philosophical subtext, environmental philosopher J. Baird Callicott has even gone so far as to dub Whites essay the seminal paper in environmental ethics.
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LYNN WHITE, JR 1907-87.
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Autor/in / Beteiligte Person: | Nelson, Michael P. ; Palmer, Joy A. ; Cooper, David E. ; Corcoran, Peter Blaze |
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Zeitschrift: | Fifty Key Thinkers on the Environment, 2000-12-07, S. 200-206 |
Quelle: | Fifty Key Thinkers on the Environment; (2000-12-07) S. 200-206 |
Veröffentlichung: | 2000 |
Medientyp: | Buch |
ISBN: | 978-0-415-14699-9 (print) |
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