When human nature confronts the need for a global environmental ethics.

Abstract

Absent from many studies about climate-change is the motivational connection to human nature. All but gone from the public and natural sciences discourse is any rationale that the environment is not actually the problem; rather, it is human behavior. The predictable result of focusing conservation and environmental research on effects (e.g., climatechange), is avoidance of their ultimate causes. This article argues that this is a form of mass social-institutional denial. People must consume, but they consume in excess for a variety of social and cultural reasons that are simply an extension of human nature. Technological fixes will do nothing more than postpone “overshoot and collapse” by 3050 years, as recent studies show. Denying the origins and complexity of human motivation to consume, while focusing institutional research and public attention on ecological disturbances that exclude human beings is entirely doomed to failure as the environmental measures of the last 50 years demonstrate. Regrettably, 50 years of research has done little to improve the planet and the long-term security of humanity. Studies suggest that the only approach to developing an environmentally sustainable global society will involve the development of a conservation ethics consistent with our evolutionary motives, which evolutionary psychologists could facilitate.