ENVIRONMENTAL

VALUE SYSTEMS
• Jigsaw Activity

WHAT IS ESS?
• The worldwide campaign to raise awareness and coordinate action to
tackle the negative effects that humans have on the environment

NASA's Appollo 8 mission 1968

photo of earth

DEVELOPMENT OF THE
ENVIRONMENTAL MOVEMENT
• Advocates SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT through
changes in public policy and individual behaviour
• Classify the scenarios provided into changes in public
policy or changes in individual behaviour

THE ENVIRONMENTAL
MOVEMENT
• Significant historical influences on the development of
the environmental movement have come from:
1. Major environmental disasters
2. Literature
3. Media
4. International agreements
5. Technological developments

THE ENVIRONMENTAL
MOVEMENT
• 1956 – Minamata + Chisso Corporation
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iTQ5zf050-w
• 1984 – Union Carbide in Bhopal
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HXDOzMRrKlo
• 1986 – Chernobyl in Ukraine
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfKm0XXfiis
• 2011 –Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUBxtTEOiPI

1. MAJOR ENVIRONMENTAL
DISASTERS
• 1962 – Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekDeG-BJYnE
• 1972 – The Club of Rome’s Limit’s to Growth
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7b9JAMm3msA
• 1979 – James Lovelock’s Gaia
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I47vhzErOCE

2. LITERATURE
• 1970 – Whaling and ‘Save the Whale’
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5GUl7ZGwyk
• 2006 – An Inconvenient Truth – Al Gore
• 1970 - 22nd April - Earth Day -
U.S. Senator from Wisconsin, Gaylord Nelson – oil spill in
Santa Barbara, California

3. MEDIA
• (1972) – UN conference on the Human Environment (Stockholm
Convention) – how human activity was affecting the global environment
• 1987 – Our common future (Brundtland report) – sustainable development
• 1992 - Rio Earth Summit – Agenda 21 – blue print for action to achieve
sustainable development worldwide
• 1997 – Kyoto Protocol – Climate change
• 2002 - Johannesburg World Summit on sustainable development – social
issues
• 2012 – Rio+20
• 2011 – Durban conference – both MEDC’s and LEDC’s , legally binding
treaties
• 2015 - Paris Agreement - 195 countries adopted the first-ever universal,
legally binding global climate deal.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=do1ddtwT7Y8

4. INTERNATIONAL AGREEMENTS
• Green Revolution
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HucSCNQ01X4
•
http://study.com/academy/lesson/what-is-the-green-revol
ution-definition-benefits-and-issues.html
(Human population will start decreasing within 50 years -
after 1798)
• Alternative fuels

5. TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATIONS
ENVIRONMENTAL VALUE
SYSTEMS
• It is a particular worldview or a set of paradigms that
shapes the way an individual, or group of people,
perceive and evaluate environmental issues.
• It might be considered as a system with assemblages of
parts and the relationships between them, which together
constitute as a whole and have inputs, outputs and
storages

DEFINITION
• HOW WOULD YOU REACT:
• If you see a banana peel on the road and you see 3 people
have slipped after stepping on it?
• If you see a person slaughtering a cow?
• If you see a person opening his car door and spitting paan
on the road?
• If a beef or ham sandwich was offered to you?

EVS
• INPUTS:
• Education
• Cultural influences
• Economic factors
• Socio – political factors
• Religious texts and doctrines
• Media
• OUTPUTS:
• Courses of action
• Perspectives
• Decisions on how to act

SYSTEMS APPROACH
• EVS’s act within social systems
• They are:
• Class-based
• Democratic
• Authoritarian
• Patriarchal
• Matriarchal
• Religion-based
• Industrial
• Agrarian
• Capitalist Match the following examples with the type
of social system
• communist

SOCIAL SYSTEMS
 SOCIAL SYSTEMS ECOSYSTEMS

Flow of information, ideas and people Flow of energy and matter

Social levels Trophic levels

SOCIAL SYSTEMS AND

ECOSYSTEMS - DIFFERENCES
• Exist at different scales
• Feedback
• Equilibrium
• Consumers and producers

SOCIAL SYSTEMS AND

ECOSYSTEMS - SIMILARITIES
RANGE OF EVS’s
 CO2 pumped into disused coal
fields – it displaces methane
which could be used as a fuel

CO2 pumped into saline

aquifers where it can remain
CO2 produced in power
in safe storage
stations

CO2 pumped into oil fields

where it helps maintain
pressure – this makes
extraction of oil easier

TECHNOCENTRIC APPROACH TO
REDUCING CO2 EMMISSIONS
WHERE DO YOU
THINK THE
FOLLOWING
PEOPLE FALL?
“Every part of the earth is
sacred to my people. Every
shining pine needle, every
sandy shore, every mist in
the dark woods, every
meadow, every humming
insect. All are holy in the
memory and experience of
my people.”

Chief Seattle
 “ A thing is right when it tends to preserve
the integrity, stability and beauty of the
biotic community. It is wrong when it
tends otherwise.”
“We abuse land because we regard it as a
commodity belonging to us.  When we
see land as a community to which we
belong, we may begin to use it with love
and respect.”
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac

Aldo Leapold, 1949

“ Like the resource it seeks to protect, wildlife conservation must be
dynamic, changing as conditions change, seeking always to become
more effective.”
"The most alarming of all man's assaults upon the environment is the
contamination of air, earth, rivers, and sea with dangerous and even
lethal materials. This pollution is for the most part irrecoverable; the
chain of evil it initiates not only in the world that must support life
but in living tissues is for the most part irreversible. In this now
universal contamination of the environment, chemicals are the
sinister and little-recognized partners of radiation in changing the
very nature of the world—the very nature of its life."

Rachel Carson
“A billion could live off the earth; 6 billion living as we do is
far too many, and you run out of planet in no time.”

“ Any species that harms the environment to a point where it

threatens its own progeny is doomed and will become
extinct...and that's us.”

James Lovelock – The Gaia

Hypothesis
“The earth, the air, the land and the water are not am
inheritance from our fore fathers but on loan from our
children. So we have to handover to them at least as it was
handed over to us.”

“There is a sufficiency in the world for man’s need but not

for man’s greed.”

Mahatma Gandhi
"It would be helpful if we opened up ANWR (The Alaskan
National Wildlife Refuge – a wilderness reserve). I think it's a
mistake not to. And I would urge you all to travel up there
and take a look at it and you can make the determination as
to how beautiful that country is.”

Mar. 29, 2001

George W. Bush
 “ One of the things I draw from the Genesis story is the importance of us
being good stewards of the land, of this incredible gift. And I think there
have been times where we haven’t been [good stewards], and this is one
of those times where we’ve got to take the warning seriously [about
climate change]. And part of what my religious faith teaches me is to take
an intergenerational view, to recognize that we are borrowing this planet
from our children and our grandchildren…. We have to find resources in
ourselves to make sacrifices so we don’t leave it to the next generation.
We’ve got to be less wasteful, both as a society and in our own individual
lives … As president, I hope to rally the entire world around the
importance of us being good stewards of the land.”
Source: 2008 Democratic Compassion Forum at Messiah College Apr 13, 2008

Barrack Obama
• Judaeo-Christian and Buddhist societies
(stewardship) (intrinsic part of nature)

• Native Americans and European pioneers

(animistic religion) (frontier economics)

CONTRASTING EVS’s
• Create a table that summarizes the ecocentric and
technocentric approaches to each of the 3 case studies in
Pgs. 15 - 17

DECISION MAKING AND

EVS’s
• Different EVS’s view the different components of the
biosphere in very different ways and attribute to them
different values
• Examples
• An intrinsic value has an inherent worth irrespective of
economic considerations
• Intrinsic values include values based on:
• Cultural
• Aesthetic
• Bequest significance

INTRINSIC VALUE