The Slow Evolution of Environmental Ethics

Abstract

Cultural attitudes to environment are always implicitly ethical: that is to say, they imply questions of how we should behave and act in relation to the natural world. As Carolyn Merchant has argued, envisaging the Earth as our mother is likely to imply a different way of interacting with the Earth than envisaging it as dead matter. It is possible to argue that the decisive break came in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, when Bacon, while still using the maternal metaphor, proposed that mankind should seek ``in the womb of nature many secrets of excellent use'', and Descartes made the distinction between res cogitans and res extensa.