Adela J. Gondek is a Lecturer in Discipline at Columbia University, where she has been a faculty member since 1989. She teaches ethics in four programs and is based in the Department of Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Biology.
Food ethics, water ethics, climate ethics and others are among a new set of ethics formed largely since the turn of the millennium, within the field of sustainability. Locally and globally they have emerged in the context of grassroots movements, organizational activity, governmental regulation and scholarly research, and are frequently called sectoral or sector-based ethics. None are settled; all continue to be framed, discussed and reformed. In 1948, the naturalist Aldo Leopold famously called the ecosystem a land pyramid, describing it as a fountain of energy in view of its capacity to transform the sun’s energy into a circuit of life. Yet the fountain of energy has been a fountain of ethics, too. Among them, sectoral or sector-based ethics address various human needs and how they ought to be met. Mapping such ethics consequently helps to identify and facilitate the goals of sustainability management and policy.
Sectoral ethics can be sorted into two main groups. One pertains to the most basic human needs, those for land, water and air, long presumed to be satisfied by nature. This presumption is increasingly untenable insofar as existing practices degrade ecological functions. In response, new practices are sought, informed by new ethics. Resource ethics are concerned with the processes by which materials are extracted from land, often in ways perceived to be unfair. Common goods such as Amazonian biodiversity and rainforests may be irreversibly depleted; while wars have been financed with conflict minerals, including the most contentious of them, conflict diamonds, as in Angola and Cote d’Ivoire. Water ethics pertain to the accessibility of a water supply suitable and sufficient for human use. Worldwide any substantial diversion, contamination or damming of water is likely to be much disputed: nearly 150 nations share 200 transboundary river basins covering 45% of the earth’s land surface. Exploiting ancient aquifers is similarly, if more recently disputed. The ethics of clean air pertain to air pollution and related Issues such as acid rain, ozone depletion and even weather modification by means of cloud seeding. In the United States, the Clean Air Act was passed in 1963. Yet poor air quality persists in many industrial areas, such as that of petrochemical production in Louisiana. Waste ethics have arisen to address the pollution of land, water and air with toxic solid, liquid and gaseous matter, including radioactive substances. Sometimes called the chemicals regime, several international treaties, including the Basel Convention of 1989, reflect these ethics and pertain particularly to the transboundary movement of hazardous substances.
Like the first, the second main group of sectoral ethics is concerned with meeting basic human needs. Unlike those for land, water and air, however, there is no longstanding presumption that nature itself will satisfy these needs, which conform roughly to Henry David Thoreau’s list in Walden (1854): food, fuel, clothing and shelter. Human ingenuity, effort and tools have always been required for meeting these needs. Yet unsustainable practices have made it increasingly difficult to do so; and again, corresponding sectoral ethics have emerged. Food ethics pertain to the depletion of common goods such as fisheries, as in the 1992 collapse of the northwest Atlantic cod fishery; or of soil itself, as in the 1930s, when poor farming practices reduced 100,000,000 acres of the Great Plains to the Dust Bowl. The use of agricultural chemicals, the rise of GMOs and CAFOs, and the dominance of global food monopolies are related challenges. Energy ethics pertain to the accessibility of sufficient electrical power for socio-economic development in all regions and nations, and the ecological trade-offs implied by oil production, coal mining, large scale dams, hydraulic fracturing and burning wood for fuel. Industrialization has gone far to meet the human need for clothing, a need previously met mainly by women, spinning, weaving and sewing across cultures.
However, the ethics of enough have arisen to address, among other consumer goods, the millions of recyclable garments dumped annually into landfills worldwide, as laborers in garment and other factories are left with inadequate or no regulatory protection. Place ethics focus upon the human need for shelter, including the availability of housing under routine conditions, and the accommodation of migratory peoples displaced by circumstances such as conflict and disaster. In this regard, climate ethics focus upon the rights and obligations pertaining to the global impact of climate change, in the wake of problematic practices for meeting human needs, whether to excess or defect, amid wealth or poverty, in all pertinent sectors.
Researching emergent and evolving sectoral ethics in the context of sustainability sheds light upon human needs and how they can be met justly. Elements of fairness, such as inclusivity, equality, legitimacy and equity, developed and implemented in one sector may be reapplied in another. Any form of sectoral ethics may be ramified into others: noise ethics, for example, have been suggested as a ramification of place ethics, particularly in urban areas. Meeting the basic needs in relation to which sectoral ethics have already formed facilitates meeting related needs: the remediation of pollution and hunger facilitates health, which in turn facilitates education and the progress of professional organization and civil society. Assembled all together sectoral ethics provide a map for navigating moral storms to reach sustainability.