World of Philosophy

Author(s): Christopher Key Chapple, Intaj Malek, Dilip Charan, Sunanda Shastri, Prashant Dave
Publisher: Shanti Prakashan

Page 591

sits. The wholesale felling of trees for utterly selfish purposes is both ethically and ecologically wrong. The same can be said about the hunting of birds and wild animals for sheer enjoyment. Whether the earth requires our existence or not, we do need the earth with all its beauty, variety and wealth. According to some thinkers, 'the bigger is the better'. But there are others like Schumacher who stand for the dictum 'small is beautiful'. Whatever may be the modicum of truth contained in these theses, the truth is that man needs the earth both for his biological existence and for his growth as an integrated personality. He is neither the maker nor the master of this planet. Yet it is his responsibility to respect and protect this rich and beautiful earth. Even Julian Huxley, an evolutionist thinker and biologist, is not prepared to leave the course of future development of the Homo sapiens to the natural process of biological evolution with its natural selection. Instead he rightly opts for rational selection regarding man's future survival; and man's evolution, he remarks, is not biological but psychological; it operates by the mechanism of cultural tradition which involves cumulative self-reproduction and self-variation of mental activities and their products. Accordingly, major steps in the human phase of evolution are achieved by breakthroughs in the new dominant patterns of mental organisation of knowledge, ideas and beliefs-ideological instead of biological or physiological organisation. Further, he writes: "Man's destiny is to be the sole agent for the future evolution of the planet." This view of a worldrenowned biologist, suggests human responsibility towards Nature in general. Sometimes, it is said that the earth is a superorgamsm. So the phenomenon of pollution is not a serious threat to life in general and human life in particular on this globe. It is argued that the living earth will always react in such a way as to restore the environment or Nature to its original state. This view is based upon James Lovelock's controversial scientific Gaia hypothesis about the earth (The Ages of Gaia, 1988). Gaia refers to the Greek goddess of Earth. This supposition is very much similar to Greek hylozoism. This guess implies that man need not worry about the damage he has done to the environment. Moreover, it also suggests that to say “we have damaged nature” makes no sense for everything that we do is natural. But this I think is too much. Our historical experience of the bombing of twin Japanese cities during the Second World War, explosion of Chernobyl plant in Soviet Russia, Bhopal tragedy in India, pollution of planetary resources such as climate, ponds, rivers, and even sea, go counter to the above mentioned thesis. We are rightly warned that if man continues to be recklessly exploitative towards nature, one day he will have to repent for his suicidal misdeeds. Lovelock, the formulator of the Gaia hypothesis, was the first scientist to measure chemicals in the air. It is he who showed that these chemicals were widespread and persistent in the earth's atmosphere; but he had concluded
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