African Environmental Ethics Research Articles

African Environmental Ethics and Its Ontological Foundations

Abstract The article carves out a tripartite ontology and related cosmological views, prevalent in many African philosophical accounts, and shows their significance for environmental ethics. It presents distinct cultural practices towards non-human animals and the environment such as totemism, taboos, and the sacralization of natural sites. In a next step, the author identifies specific moral principles that can be derived from this complex ontology and its related cultural practices, such as sufficiency, care, and sharing. This approach in environmental ethics can be situated as constituting a ‘plural holism’. Finally, the article contrasts this plural holism with neoliberal and neo-colonial practices prevalent in the contemporary world and calls for a consideration of these ethical values to guide the necessary transformation of our societies.

Can African environmental ethics help in weathering Gardiner’s storm?

African environmental ethics (AEE) encompasses specific features that make it well-equipped to tackle many of the ethical issues posed by climate change. In particular, the African prescription to foster harmonious relations between oneself and other humans, non-human animals and nature as a whole, and the African notion of land ownership enable AEE to offer the moral and theoretical resources needed to deal with the climate change problem. I use Stephen Gardiner’s analysis - which likens climate change to a perfect moral storm - to show that traditional AEE can handle climate change’s most challenging aspects. Since, as Gardiner proposes, we lack an ethical theory capable of responding to the challenges posed by this perfect moral storm, it is significant to show the benefits that the African ethical approach offers in this regard. Such a systematic analysis, that uses Gardiner’s storm as a basis, has not been undertaken before.

African Environmental Ethics Against Anthropocentric Western Environmental Ethics: A Postcolonial Criticism

Dünyada çevre sorunları hızla artarken, bu sorunlardan sadece gelişmiş Batılı devletler değil, Afrika gibi sömürgeciliğe maruz kalmış coğrafyalar da nasibini almıştır. Dünyayı böylesine geniş ölçüde etkileyen çevre sorunları, özünde insan ile doğa arasındaki ilişkinin nasıl olması gerektiği üzerine eğilen çevre etiğinin başlıca ilgi alanı olmuştur. Söz konusu çevre etiği ise dünyanın farklı bölgelerinden çok sayıda görüş ve yaklaşımı içerir. Bu çalışmanın amacı; Afrika çevre etiğinin insan merkezci Batılı çevre etiği yaklaşımından farkını ortaya koymaktır. Bunun için öncelikle Batılı çevre etiğinin ve daha geniş bağlamda Afrika çevre etiğinin muhtevasına, daha sonrasında ise Afrika’dan Batıya ve insan merkezci Batılı çevre etiğine yönelik eleştirilere yer verilecektir. Söz konusu eleştiriler ise bunları daha uygun ifade etme olanağı sunan postkolonyal eleştiri çerçevesinde sunulacaktır. Çalışma sonucunda; kendi içerisinde daha yerel ve toplulukçu şekillerde bir çeşitlilik ve zenginlik barındırsa da belli ortak özelliklere dayanan Afrika çevre etiğinin, Batıda egemen olan insan merkezci çevre etiğinden farklı olduğu görülmüş ve ayrıca gelecek çalışmalar için önerilerde de bulunulmuştur.

Ndu-Mmili-Ndu-Azu ("Live-and-Let-Live")

In three parts, this article sketches the version of African environmental ethics that was developed and promoted by Chigbo Ekwealo who was a renowned environmental philosopher in Africa. The first part is a sketch of the principles and doctrine of his environmental ethics. The second part traces the intellectual history of his environmental ethics, the influences on it and its influence on the global environmental ethics movement. The third part is a critique of his environmental ethics based on contemporary and global circumstances. It is demonstrated how Ekwealo’s environmental ethics attempted to consciously depart from earlier versions of African environmental ethics in terms of its rejection of the neo-materialist, polemical, and supernatural features of other views. This article contributes to a reconstruction of the environmental thought of one of the founders of the African environmental movement whose thoughts are not accessible to most contemporary environmental philosophers today.

Revisiting the Discourse on Human-Nature Relationship in African Traditional Religion and the Responses to the Environmental Change

The pantheistic view of nature enshrined in African traditional religious beliefs and thought systems has propelled a myriad of African scholars to assume that the environmental ethical position of ATR on human-nature relations is environment-centered. This is a result of the ineptitude of some scholars to critically analyze the complexity involved in the discourse on human-nature relations in traditional African religious beliefs, borne out of an ethnocentric mindset to eulogize ATR. An in-depth understanding of African traditional religious environmental ethics requires a full grasp of African ontology. On this note, to clear this age-old misconception about Traditional African notions on human-nature relations, this research aims at simplifying the complexity or ambiguity surrounding the discourse and brings to the fore the anthropocentric view of African Traditional Religion and environmental ethics on human-nature relations. The paper argues vehemently that African religious belief in human-nature relations is absolutely anthropocentric.

Rethinking the premises underlying the right to development in African human rights jurisprudence

AbstractThe current rate of planetary destruction, which is grounded in an understanding of development as economic growth based on environmental exploitation, has catastrophic consequences for organized human existence. The African human rights system, through the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights (the African Charter), is one of the few international legal systems which provides for an enforceable right to development and to a healthy environment. This article argues that the dichotomy set up between the right to development and the right to a healthy environment is ultimately false, because an understanding of development which does not take account of the environmental aspects is untenable in the long run. It is argued that the African Charter and its interpretation by the African Commission and the African Court have resulted in the establishment of important principles towards a revised understanding of development, not based on economic considerations, but rather as human well‐being (physical, mental, emotional and social considerations) within a healthy environment. It is further argued that important principles in African environmental ethics should be recognized in interpreting the right to development, which require that development takes place with the necessary regard and reverence for the environment.

African Environmental Ethics: Keys to Sustainable Development Through Agroecological Villages

This essay proposes African-based ethical solutions to profound human problems and a working African model to address those problems. The model promotes sustainability through advanced agroecological and information communication technologies. The essay’s first section reviews the ethical ground of that model in the work of the Senegalese scholar, Cheikh Anta Diop. The essay’s second section examines an applied African model for translating African ethical speculation into practice. Deeply immersed in European and African ethics, Godfrey Nzamujo developed the Songhaï Centers to solve the problem of rural poverty in seventeen African countries. Harnessing advanced technologies within a holistic agroecological ecosystem, Nzamujo’s villages furnish education spanning the fields of ethics, information communication technology, microbiology, international development, and mechanical, electrical, civil and biological engineering in a community-based and centered development enterprise. The essay proposes a global consortium of ecovillages based on Nzamujo’s model. The final section explores funding methods for the consortium. The conclusion contemplates a return to Africa to supplement environmental ethics that enhance life’s future on earth.

Nussbaum’s capability approach and African environmental ethics: is the African voice heard?

ABSTRACT Martha Nussbaum’s capability approach (CA) offers a framework for a universal conception of human development. This paper interrogates Nussbaum’s approach using African environmental ethics (AEE) to see if it captures African ways of valuing nature. It looks at two ways in which Nussbaum’s approach considers the value of the natural environment: a) by applying her list of capabilities to non-human animals and b) by including, what is here termed, an environmental capability in Nussbaum's list of ten central capabilities she deems necessary for a person to flourish. The author argues that, despite limitations and need for further exploration, the second way of ‘environment capability’ aligns well with how nature is valued in AEE. The author also shows that both Nussbaum and AEE value nature in a way that, while not necessarily intrinsic, goes beyond material instrumentality and opens avenues for further discussion of the capabilities approach in traditional value systems

African Bioconservatism and the Challenge of the Transhumanist Technoprogressism

This reflection focuses on the interaction between technoscience in general and the Transhumanist movement in particular on the one hand and African culture today on the other hand. Traditional African culture can be considered as a bioconservative culture, what Tangwa calls eco-bio-communitarianism. However, the ideology underlying the Transhumanist revolution is Technoprogressism with a frantic taste for the artefactual over the natural and the promotion of artificial intelligence. In the face of the Transhumanist movement, can the African still remain bioconservative? In this paper, relying on Godfrey B. Tangwa’s work on the African perspective of bioethics and Jerome Mbih Tosam’s paper which analyses African environmental ethics in view of sustainable development, I would like to suggest a positive interaction between the African bioconservative or prolife attitude and Western Technoprogressism in this era of Transhumanist revolution. Africans, while inevitably opening up to the world, to the Promethean spirit, must be able to preserve the traditional values which constitute the soul of their culture and which participate in the protection of the environment, the protection of life, the protection of human dignity at a time when the world is experiencing an ecological and health crisis under the effects of the omnivorous spirit of research that characterizes Western culture.

African Environmental Ethics

African Environmental Ethics

African Environmental Ethics and Sustainable Development

In this paper, I argue that African environmental ethics can contribute to sustainable development as well as mitigate the devastating effects of global warming and climate change in Africa. Although Africa bears the least onus of responsibility for global warming and climate change, she suffers the greatest burden of the adverse effects of global climate change and environmental crisis. While industrialized countries, nations which are largely responsible for the greatest amount of greenhouse emissions are laggard and reticent in implementing international agreements aimed at palliating the untoward effects of climate change, there is an urgent need to seek indigenous solutions to environmental crisis in Africa without compromising the much needed development in the continent. African environmental ethics extends the moral community beyond anthropocentric concerns by including non-human animals, plants, the unborn, and the supernatural into the moral universe. I use Kom environmental ethics to show how indigenous African societies employed different values and customs to make their environment physically and spiritually sustainable. There were taboos, values, and norms which prescribed correct behavior towards nature. But as a result of the colonial encounter, Africans were forced to abandon some of these indigenous environmental values and sustainable practices for an anthropocentric approach. With this outlook where humans have moral responsibility only towards humans, development meant the complete disregard for traditional African holistic values and customs. This disregard, in conjunction with weak or absence of institutional framework regarding environmental protection and corruption in the management of natural resources, has led to unsustainable exploitation of the natural environment in Africa.

Interpreting Ecofeminist Environmentalism in African Communitarian Philosophy and Ubuntu: An Alternative to Anthropocentrism

The question of what an African ecofeminist environmental ethical view ought to look like remains unanswered in much of philosophical writing on African environmental ethics. I consider what an African ecofeminist environmental ethics ought to look like if values salient in African communitarian philosophy and ubuntu are seriously considered. After considering how African communitarian philosophy and ubuntu foster communitarian living, relational living, harmonious living, interrelatedness and interdependence between human beings and various aspects of nature, I reveal how African communitarian philosophy and ubuntu could be interpreted from an ecofeminist environmental perspective. I suggest that this underexplored ecofeminist environmental ethical view in African philosophical thinking might be reasonably taken as an alternative to anthropocentric environmentalism. I urge other ethical theorists on African environmentalism not to neglect this non-anthropocentric African environmentalism that is salient in African ecofeminist environmentalism.

Is deep ecology inapplicable in African context: a conversation with Fainos Mangena

In 2015, Fainos Mangena published an essay entitled “How Applicable is the Idea of Deep Ecology in the African Context?” where he presented a number of arguments to support his thesis that deep ecology as discussed in the West has no place in the African context. Mangena later presented a counter-version of deep ecology that he claims is based on African philosophy. In this paper, I interrogated Mangena’s arguments for rejecting deep ecology and found that they were based on certain erroneous presuppositions. Further, I developed a critique of Mangena’s Shona version of deep ecology which shows it to be impractical, unappealing, and based on a misunderstanding of the true nature of the modern African environment. I employ the method of conversationalism in this work.Keywords: Deep Ecology, African Environmental Ethics, Fainos Mangena

African Environmental Ethics and the Poverty of Eco-Activism in Nigeria

Discourse on the possibility and necessity of an African environmental ethics is widespread in contemporary African studies, albeit with new dimensions and emphasis. With the growing work of such scholars as S. Ogungbemi, A. Fadahunsi, G. Tangwa, P. Ojomo, C.J. Ekwealo, and W. Kelbessa, among others exploring (in different ways) the thesis of indigenous African environmental values and principles which are considered sacrosanct in the restoration of humans and the environment in Africa, it is less controversial whether or not there is awareness of environmental ethical thinking among Africans. Beyond this theoretical polemic, the present essay observes the paucity of environmental activism and movements in Nigeria, whose underlying principles and tenets are seen to be incongruent with the ostensible African environmental ethics and values. This lacuna, it is here argued, aligns with the failure to match theory with praxis in many African states—the problem of wrong prioritizing and a conceptually deficient framework for action. This essay accordingly questions some previous outlines of African ethical environmental theory, with a view to establishing a cogent hermeneutico-reconstructive theory of African environmental management, one that gives prominence to ethical theorizing without neglecting activism.

African Environmental Ethics, Indigenous Knowledge, and Environmental Challenges

African Environmental Ethics, Indigenous Knowledge, and Environmental Challenges

Perspectives in African Environmental Ethics and Philosophy

Perspectives in African Environmental Ethics and Philosophy

Can African Environmental Ethics Contribute to Environmental Policy in Africa?

Can African Environmental Ethics Contribute to Environmental Policy in Africa?

Traditional African Environmental Ethics and Colonial Legacy

Traditional African Environmental Ethics and Colonial Legacy Polycarp A. Ikuenobe Abstract Concerns have been raised about environmental problems in Africa. I argue that these environmental problems did not exist prior to colonialism because traditional Africans had conservationist values, moral attitudes, practices, and ways of life. I articulate African thoughts on ontology, cosmology, traditional medicine and healing, and religious practices that supported their conservationist moral values and attitudes. Many of these traditional conservationist values, ways of life, and moral attitudes were destroyed by the exploitative ethos of European colonialism and modernity. I show how the colonial social structures left behind still continue to engender and contribute to the environmental problems in Africa today. Full Text: PDF DOI: 10.15640/ijpt.v2n4a1