Earth Ethics: A Challenge to Liberal Education
— Earth Summit Ethics, Federal University of Rio Grande Do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil, 1992

"Earth Ethics: A Challenge to Liberal Education." Pages 161- 192 in J. Baird Callicott and Fernando Jos‚ R. da Rocha, eds., Earth Summit Ethics: Toward a Reconstructive Postmodern Philosophy of Environmenta] Education (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996). Online at: http://hdl.handle.net/10217/48071

Keynote address at Conference on Ethics, University, and Environment" at Federal University of Rio Grande Do Sul, Porto Alegre, Brazil, May 25-29, 1992. The home planet is in crisis. The two great marvels of our planet are life and mind, both among the rarest things in the universe, unknown elsewhere. Diverse combinations of nature and culture worked well enough over millennia, but no more. Our modern cultures threaten the stability, beauty, and integrity of Earth, and thereby of the cultures superposed on Earth. Behind the vision of one world is the shadow of none. We are searching for an ethics adequate to respect life on this home planet. But university education, in both the sciences and the humanities, has tended to find nature value free and to head students away from, rather than toward, an intense consciousness of land.