The Concept of Milieu in Environmental Ethics

Individual Responsibility within an Interconnected World

Laÿna Droz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367776435
• eBook ISBN: 9781000423907
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Conservation & Protection
• Index: Biological Sciences

The Concept of Milieu in Environmental Ethics discusses how we can come together to address current environmental problems at the planetary level, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, transborder pollution and desertification.

The book recognises the embedded individual sociocultural and environmental contexts that impact our everyday choices. It asks, in this pluralism of worldviews, how can we build common ground to tackle environmental issues? What is our individual moral responsibility within the larger collaborative challenge? Through philosophical reasoning, this book pragmatically addresses these questions and builds a framework to support sustainable ways of living. At the core of the book, it draws on the concept of milieu (f?do) inspired by the Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsur?, which captures how we act within and perceive our surroundings as a web of culturally, historically and geographically situated meanings and values. It argues that the milieu connects us as individuals with community, past and future history, and the natural world, providing us with common ground for global environmental ethics.

This book will be an engaging and interesting read for scholars, researchers and students in environmental ethics, philosophy and sustainability.

1 Introduction

Climate change, biodiversity loss, transborder pollution, desertification… Many current environmental problems span at the planetary level and are caused by the ways of life of countless individuals across the globe. While many of us recognize that we need to collaborate to tackle together the global environmental crisis, each of us remains embedded in sociocultural and environmental contexts and makes choices through our personal worldview. In this global context of pluralism of worldviews, how can we build common grounds to take common action and tackle environmental problems? What is our individual moral responsibility in this giant collaborative task? What do we actually want to sustain?

Philosophical and conceptual reasoning is needed to understand the depths of the current global environmental crisis and to provide some sustainable solutions to these challenges, adapted to individual questionings on how to lead a good life in our present interconnected world.¹ In an attempt to make a humble contribution to this immense enterprise, in this book, I argue that the idea of milieu can ground environmental ethics, anchor sustainability as a normative direction and help rooting individual responsibility for environmental harm. While most contributions in environmental ethics work with normative assumptions anchored in their specific sociocultural contexts, this book positions environmental ethical questions in the global context. It dwells on the concept of milieu (fūdo) inspired by the Japanese philosopher Watsuji Tetsurō and applies it in the fields of environmental ethics and global political philosophy. This book aims at building a motivational framework that supports sustainable ways of life, while being sensitive to how the environmental crisis can be overwhelming at times.

Before entering into the discussion of the concept of the milieu and the argumentation, I need to set the stage of the reasoning. I first describe the environmental and social situations that compose the current state of environmental urgency. Second, I describe the dominant key ideas underlying and informing the current situation. Third, I discuss the pragmatist approach of my project determined by the need for consensus. Finally, I describe the methodological implications of this approach and my personal standpoint.

1.1 Environmental urgency

First and foremost, it is important to situate my reasoning in the specific socio-political context and environmentally challenged world in which we are living here and now. Indeed, my project is all but detached from these concrete external constraints. It is driven by the need to understand better my relation to and what I can do about the environmental problems tinged by the socio-political contexts. It is why I start by sketching the contemporary environmental situation and the social situation.

1.1.1 Environmental situation

Our era is characterized by environmental problems such as pollution, climate change and severe biodiversity loss. Environmental problems are often intertwined and mutually reinforcing. For example, the rapid deforestation in the Amazon increases the effects of climate change by reducing the Planet’s carbon sink, induces desertification in the long run and worsens biodiversity loss by reducing the habitat of many species. Among them, species extinction is particularly disturbing. As Martin Gorke puts it:

It is irreversible, and it indicates that if destruction of nature continues, a point will eventually be reached at which even our own species may cease to exist or at least may forfeit all hopes of leading a good life.

(Emphasis in original; Gorke 2003)

This quote connects directly the severity of the environmental problems with fundamental philosophical questions such as the nature and meaning of human existence, and the normative assessment of what is a good life. Environmental problems are not merely questions of facts and of the best technology to be used to improve the material situation. They question directly our ways of life, our choices of life, the meanings and values that we attach to different ways of leading one’s life and to human life itself. In fact, environmental problems are human problems because our human ways of life are their main cause, and because they threaten and harm our human ways of life and projects. They are our problem, as we are living intertwined in webs of complex constitutive relations with each other, other species and the interconnected world.

Ethics is the area of philosophy dealing with how we should lead our lives, and how we should behave in the everyday life. Understood in these terms, ethics exists in every human culture at all times. It is rooted in the very fact that we are able to reflect on ourselves, on our actions and on our behaviours. Until the last century, the realm of ethics was largely confined to behaviours and action between individual fellow humans, and to behaviours between and towards groups of humans. On its margin, it sometimes included behaviours towards other elements of our world, such as animals, plants, rocks, or deities, wind and spirits. As guiding norms and rules of how to live, it was largely localized and tightly intertwined with local cultures, social contexts and specific environmental challenges. Even if people moved and ideas were always exchanged all around our unique planet, for most people, questions of ethics tended to be limited to their current actions towards other beings in presence.

Economic globalization and technologies of communication have extended the reach of our daily actions to spaces and times beyond our physically situated standing point. Most of the environmental problems we are facing nowadays are consequences of a global increase in consumption of material goods, which are processed and transported over long distances. This state of affairs is rooted in a mainstream consumerist framework nourished by ideologies such as economic globalization and liberal capitalism. The champions of technical or technological optimism believe and argue that most of these environmental problems are not to be worried about, because they can be counterbalanced by technological intervention. For instance, the adverse effects of climate change could be mitigated by the deliberate and large-scale manipulation of the Earth’s climate system, known as geoengineering. Despite their vehemence, it cannot be expected to solve all environmental problems by a sudden improvement in technological knowledge. The best example of this impossibility is habitat destruction and species extinction.

Nature-based solutions aim to protect, sustainably manage and restore ecosystems to allow them to provide benefits and support human well-being. They are claimed to be safer and more cost-effective than technological solutions. For example, coastal mangrove forest can be maintained and restored to act as a buffer between land and sea and protect communities from storms and erosion, which is crucial to face the effects of climate change. Human-made substitutes, such as dikes and seawalls, are costlier and do not provide all the advantages of natural mangrove ecosystems. Nature-based solutions slowly gain importance in the international discourses regarding environmental problems. They show that the solutions to our human environmental problems are all but disconnected from our ways of life with, and our ideas of nature.

Another aspect that highlights the interconnectedness of our lives with the natural world is health. At the individual scale, our health depends on the food we eat, the water we drink and the air we breathe, that all largely come from ecosystems and the natural environment. At a regional scale, a healthy local natural environment gives us the freedom to use the space without fear for our health, be it from air pollution, water and soil contamination, etc. We are vulnerable to changes in nature as individuals and as communities. Moreover, ecosystems are interconnected at the planetary level. Organisms – including invasive species, microorganisms and virus – travel across long distances across the globe. Air pollution and plastic pollution move without any consideration for human political borders. And the effects of climate change wreak havoc globally. The same human activities that drive climate change and biodiversity loss also drive an increasing pandemic risk by reducing species habitats and species reservoirs, increasing contacts between humans, livestock and wildlife, and the possibilities for microbes of animal origin to adapt to human hosts (IPBES 2020). Ideas of planetary health emerged from the recognition of the interdependence between environmental health, animal health and human health. In this view, for human lives to flourish, we need a healthy planetary environment, including habitats for diverse species and ecological connectivity between ecosystems.

The direct drivers with the largest global impacts on the natural world are identified to be changes in land and sea use, direct exploitation of organisms, climate change, pollution and invasion of alien species (IPBES 2019). They emerge from human activities, such as the overexploitation of ecosystems and species, land clearing, unsustainable agriculture and fishing, infrastructures expansion and overconsumption. These human activities are shaped by sociocultural, political and economic factors. Ultimately, they are rooted in ways of life that are anchored in worldviews and ideas regarding what a good life is. Therefore, even if technology improves significantly, develops in collaboration with nature and offers the best possible solutions at a given time, relying exclusively on it would ignore that the roots of the problems are in the choices of behaviours informed by our worldviews and by the ethical reflections we make. The latter may be exactly what make us human, and what give subjective meanings to our individual existence. To reflect about it is thus a worthwhile choice.

1.1.2 Social situation

Nowadays more than ever, individual actions are interwoven with webs of social structures and systems. Rare are those who consume exclusively what they produce with their own hands using homemade tools. Cellphones have conquered the most remote communities making them part of the buzzing world web of exchange of information. But as liberating and free as it might look from a sedentary perspective, this web is compartmentalized and organized by the intervention of states and various other actors and limitations, from the language used to the design of the algorithms of the programs.

The current socio-political organization of the world’s human societies is centred on state sovereignty and the rule of law. At the same time, economic lobbies and multinationals have tremendous power over politics and social organizations. In many cases, the governments are hostages of economic lobbies. These lobbies tend to be focused on short-term profit in opposition to long-term sustainability. Environmental laws and the efficiency of their enforcement are the result of continuous more or less transparent negotiations between groups of stakeholders, including government officials and economical lobbies, as well as political parties, the scientific community, the media and civil society. As a result of this often obscure negotiation process, environmental laws not only have severe gaps, but their enforcement is also occasionally unsatisfying. Dependent on regions and states, examples of gaps in environmental laws range from lack of regulation to control irregular uses of land and waters by individuals and enterprises, to uncomplete listing of hazardous substances leading to the improper disposal of harmful wastes. While governments, NGOs and scientists work on improving and updating the legislation, other individuals and enterprises, knowingly or unknowingly, take advantages of these gaps to continue practices degrading the environment and depleting natural resources.

Umbrella organizations such as the United Nations (UN) bodies and international NGOs have limited power as they rely on state sovereignty, and states are widely affected by various types and levels of influence by the economic lobbies. Different programs developed by international organizations attempt to skip the states and the problem of law enforcement by empowering local communities and individuals. Some of these projects can be found under the label “localization of the Sustainable Development Goals”. They aim to empower local communities by sharing mainly educational resources (sometimes also financial and legal resources). Despite an encouraging start, the success of these initiatives remains limited, and is always restricted by dominant actors inside nation-states, be it the government, the military, the economic corporations or others.

In the recent years, social media have taken a tremendous importance in designing the global discourses. On the one hand, this can seem worrying, as it gives immense socio-political powers to social media platforms such as Facebook, WeChat and Line, which are enterprises seeking profits, and not social mediators of conflicts. Yet, by becoming the stage of conflicts and the main space where some groups share information and express their worries and discontentment, they are also called to play a much larger role than keeping the servers running. Any small change in the design of the algorithms can have a massive impact on who sees what kind of information, and so on shaping public opinion. On the other hand, social media platforms have also been used to give a voice to underrepresented people, and they are a central tool of activism, including environmental activism. They are not only used by individual users, but also by governments, NGOs, research institutes and UN bodies to actively try to influence the global discourse “for the better”, for example for biodiversity conservation campaigns and for the promotion of nature-based solutions. A significant part of environmental NGOs funding, at least in Western countries, comes from individual members, by membership fees, donations or legs. Social media campaigning is a crucial tool for these NGOs to reach to potential new members and to raise awareness about the issue they are working on.

The landscape of nowadays’ applied ethical thinking has widely changed from a hundred years ago. Individual ethical agents (taken to be any conscious human being) are connected and exchanging with more conversation partners than ever before. The consequences of individual agents’ actions are also taking place at a very large scale. We are all connected to other human beings through our shared environment, through the economic ties of trade and through the traditional media (newspapers, radio, TV) and the Internet and social media. In other words, we are interacting at an unprecedented scale, and any interaction has social and often environmental consequences. Therefore, we need some common guidelines to orientate our behaviour beyond our immediate surroundings. We need some tools to make sense of the social and environmental situation we live in, that grasp the multiple layers of complexity without sacrificing sociocultural diversity for the sake of explanatory efficiency....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Milieu
• 3 Sustainability
• 4 Responsibility
• 5 Conclusion
• Index