Environmental Medicine And Philosophy Of Environmental Pprotection

Author(s): Julian Aleksandrowicz
Publisher: Julian Aleksandrowicz

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80 PHILOSOPHY AND SOCIAL ACTION During the period of slavery the salaves were deprived of the most elementary human rights. Feudalism treated the peasants as belonging to the land, just like utensils and chattel. The ethical and intellectual level of the people who today pollute the air, water and soil from the moral point of view does not surpass that of their barbaric ancestors. In such a structure of the world it becomes increasingly more difficult to find a road leading to the satisfaction of the psychic and somatic needs of man, conditioning his health. After all, these roads have got lost in the uncontrolled inter-relations between the technosphere, the biosphere and the sociosphere. Though machines facilitate the work of the muscles and help to solve extremely difficult intellectual tasks, they are not fit to perform the functions of masters and cannot serve as a model of human feeling and human thought. Unfortunately, however, this model is becoming more and more widespread under the sky of the technosphere. No wonder that the law of demand and supply continues to have absolute power; the reification of man and man's indifference contribute to the deepening of the precipice between people. Unselfish human kindness in regard to other people turns into a ridiculous relic of the past. Nevertheless, we must find the road leading us out of the impasse. Since we have found out that man is capable of changing his natural environment in a way that is suicidal for him, it is necessary to become convinced of our ability also to give the world a better shape. All of us, scientists and writers, should abandon our positions of a specialist's secret and disseminate knowledge, so that it may reach the thatched cottages, too, something which today with our mass media is quite possible to achieve. : The humanities and above all ethics should not only keep step with technical sciences, but even outdistance the latter. What can save us is a scientific and humanistic revolution, which would embrace all the people throughout the world. One of its fundamental features, a condition for protection from the rapidly rising trends of civilizational diseases therefore is the awakening of an ecological conscience among youth and adults. This notion means to me the absolute necessity to protect the psycho-social and biophysical environment, in order consciously to improve "the quality of life", so that it would be conducive to health. From Polish Translated by (Courtesy : Dialectics and Humanism) Maria Paczynska