The document discusses the concepts of environmental ethics and ecology. It defines environmental ethics as the study of humans' moral obligation to preserve the natural environment and order. It discusses the theory of moral extensionism, which argues that natural entities have intrinsic value beyond their usefulness to humans. The document also defines ecology as the study of organism-environment interactions and interrelations. It provides examples of climatic, chemical, and biological environmental conditions. Finally, it discusses humans' relationship with nature and technology's impacts on degrading the environment.

1. Environmental Ethics

2.  We may define environmental ethics as the study of man's
moral obligation to preserve the environment and the
natural order of things.
 a) Moral Obligation - a perceived duty to perform an act
as good, or to avoid an act as evil. A recent theory called
Moral Extensionism argues that "humans have duties to
natural entities, and that the rights on which these duties
are founded are based on some intrinsically valuable
characteristic of the entity". (Thomas A. Shannon, An
Introduction to Bioethics, Paulist Press, NY, 1978, p. 153)
 Moral Extensionism departs from the traditional view that
environment is valuable only on account of its relation to
humans. It is thought that the lower life forms are "means"
towards the promotion of human life. On the
contrary, moral extensionism insists the environment and
creatures have "meaning in and of itself" beyond mere
instrumentality.

3.  b) preservation of environmentis here
taken as the final aim of environmental
philosophy. It is based o the assumed truth
that man's survival is interrelated wuth that of
hos environment.
 c) respect for the natural order of things
points to the moral practice.Man must
submit to the moral demands of natural law
and must not intervene carelessly with the
work of Nature. For example, man must "fit"
his technology to ecology.

4. Ecology

5.  -Ecology comes from the greek word
"eikos", meaning, habitation or home. It refers to
earth as our home where we survive and live.
 -As a Science, Ecology is the study of the
interrelation of organism in an environment and of
the process linking organism and place.
 Environment includes all the external forces or
conditions acting on an organism or community of
organism. These conditions are
climatic, chemical, and biological.

6.  Climatic conditions refer to the temperature and
humidity prevailing in any geographic location.
 Chemical conditions refer to the type and
concentration of chemicals in soil, water and air.
 Biological conditions refer to the interralation of
organisms or communities of organism.

7.  Environment is a process, called ecosystem. The
global ecosystem, as explained by Barry
Commoner (May 28, 1917 – September
30, 2012), is "the closed web of
climatic, chemical, and biological processes
created by living things, maintained by living
things, and through the marvelous reciprocities of
biological and geochemical evolution, uniquely
essential to the support of living things".
 an example of an ecosystem is the food chain of
prey - predator type.
 biosphere refers to global environment
supportives of life.

8. "Environmental Degradation"

9.  Environmental degradation is the large scale
despoliation of earth and its sources as a result of
human activities.
 Animal and human populations behave
similarly when they multiply beyond the
supportive capabilities of their environments.
They pollute their habitats, exhausts natural
resources, succumb to severe competition for
food, and suffer strife, malnutrition, disease and
social breakdown. The rapid increase in human
population in the last 100 years has changed the
global environment in a scale comparable to a
major geologic or climatic forces.

10.  Likewise, technological advancements are
also mainly responsible for the varied ecological
problems threatening man's survival.

11. "Man and Ecology"

12.  From ecological point of view, man is part of the
ecosystem. He is not apart, nor above Nature, but in
it. He is rooted on his environment as much as the
tree, and his mortal life is dependent upon the
ecosystem.
 Man has besides another dimension which is the
relatedness of the self. Paul Shepard observes:
 "Individual man has his particular integrity, to be sure.
Oak trees even mountains have selves or integrities
too. To our knowledge, those forms are not troubled
by seeing themselves in more than one way, as man
is. In one aspect, the self is an arrangement of
organs, feeling, and thoughts - a "me" - surrounded
by a hard body boundary: skin, clothes, and insular
habits. This idea needs no defense.

13.  It is conferred to us ny the whole history of our
civilization. Its virtue is verified by our affluence.
The alternative is a self as a center of
organization, constantly drawing on and
influencing the surroundings, whose skin and
behavior are soft zones contacting the world
instead of excluding it. Both views are real and
their reciprocity significant. We need them both to
have a healthy social and human maturity."

14.  Man is the product of the soil reported in the book
of Genesis(in the Bible). He is part of the
world, and the world is part of his body. Like an
actor on a stage, man plays a role in the
equilibrium of interdependence.
 Man's umbilical cord connects with the
earth's ecosystem, It is not romanticism that we
refer to biosphere as "Mother Nature". We are
children of nature, "the flesh and blood" of Mother
Nature. Thus, in the mysticism of St. Francis of
Assissi, man is brother to the sun, the moon, the
birds, the wolves, and the trees.

15. "Ecological Man"

16.  Ignored by the western philosophy, man's
relatedness with environment is the assumption
of environment ethics. The view is not entirely
new. Abundant traces of it are found in the
consciousness of people. For instance, the
Genesis tells how God formed man out of the soil
and placed him in the garden of Eden of all kinds
of trees nourished by forking rivers. The place
before the fall of man implied peace and harmony
among all living and non-living things.

17.  Likewise, in the Taoist and Confucian tradition a
mythical golden age is pictured. Zaener quotes
Chuang Tzu:
 "Yes, in the age of perfect virtue men lived in
common with birds and beasts, and were on terms of
equality with all creatures, as forming one family; how
could they know themselves the distinction of superior
man and small men. Equally without knowledge, they
did not leave (the path of) their natural virtue; equally
free from desires, they were in a state of pure
simplicity. In that state of pure simplicity, the nature of
people was what ought to be. But when the sagely
men appeared, limping and wheeling about in (the
exercise of) human-heartedness, pressing along and
standing on tiptoe in the doing of righteousness, then
men universally began to be perplexed." (R.C.
Zachner, The Catholic Church and World
Religions, Faith and Fact Book, Burns and

18.  Within the context of Taoism, the animism of pre-
historic Filipinos is not ignorance and superstition
but an ecological perception. That siMalakas and
siMaganda emerged from bamboo is an
allegorical explanation of man's natural
dependence on plants. For Paul Shepard this is a
possibility:
 "The elegance of such systems and the delicacy
of equilibrium are the outcome of a long evolution
of interdependence. Even society, mind and
culture are parts of that evolution. There
is, between the emergence of higher primates
and flowering plants, pollinating

19. "Lost Paradise"

20.  Both myth and science point to an ecological
paradise. That man has lost sense of his kinship
with nature owes to the influence of "ambivalent
culture". Thomas Merton traces this ambivalence
to the Puritan settlers who regarded it a religious
duty to wage war against nature. The Puritans
regarded the wilderness as the domain of moral
wickedness, since it favored
spontaneity, amounting to "sin".
 The Puritans were sagely men spoken of by
the Taoists. Their attitude towards nature was
inherited by the pioneers - both of wilderness and
of technology.

21. "Man and Technology"

22.  Technology is the complex technique for
achieving a predetermined result through
rationalized process, using various hardware
such as machines, instruments, or robots.
 Our modern city is a maze of concrete
intestines where foreign bodies of cars, buses,
factories and people crawl and squeeze each
other, belching and breathing-in poisoned gas.
Even our cultural values have been bastardized
to suit the convenience of modern life-styles.
Where, for example, agricultural needs binded
people to land and fellowmen, industrialization
has categorized people in perpetual conflict for

23. Thank You.