African Environmental Ethics and Sustainable Development
TLDR
In this article, the authors argue that African environmental ethics can contribute to sustainable development as well as mitigate the devastating effects of global warming and climate change in Africa, and they extend the moral community beyond anthropocentric concerns by including non-human animals, plants, the unborn, and the supernatural into the moral universe.Abstract:
In this paper, I argue that African environmental ethics can contribute to sustainable development as well as mitigate the devastating effects of global warming and climate change in Africa. Although Africa bears the least onus of responsibility for global warming and climate change, she suffers the greatest burden of the adverse effects of global climate change and environmental crisis. While industrialized countries, nations which are largely responsible for the greatest amount of greenhouse emissions are laggard and reticent in implementing international agreements aimed at palliating the untoward effects of climate change, there is an urgent need to seek indigenous solutions to environmental crisis in Africa without compromising the much needed development in the continent. African environmental ethics extends the moral community beyond anthropocentric concerns by including non-human animals, plants, the unborn, and the supernatural into the moral universe. I use Kom environmental ethics to show how indigenous African societies employed different values and customs to make their environment physically and spiritually sustainable. There were taboos, values, and norms which prescribed correct behavior towards nature. But as a result of the colonial encounter, Africans were forced to abandon some of these indigenous environmental values and sustainable practices for an anthropocentric approach. With this outlook where humans have moral responsibility only towards humans, development meant the complete disregard for traditional African holistic values and customs. This disregard, in conjunction with weak or absence of institutional framework regarding environmental protection and corruption in the management of natural resources, has led to unsustainable exploitation of the natural environment in Africa.read more
Citations
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Towards a hermeneutics of sustainability in Africa : engaging indigenous knowledge in dialogue with Christianity
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Personalism in African Cultures and Ethics: The Examples of the Bantus in Central, Southern Africa and of the Mossi in West Africa
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors studied the nalism of the social brand of the Bantu and the Mossi in sub-Saharan Africa and found that there is no dichotomy between the being and the Vital Force which vivifies anything that exists and last.
References
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Book
Philosophy and an African culture
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss philosophy and an African orientation in philosophy, and how not to compare African traditional thought with Western thought, as well as what can philosophy do for Africa.
BookDOI
A companion to environmental philosophy
TL;DR: In this article, a companion to environmental philosophy references is recommended to a person who wants to seek for the new things and information from many sources, while people with closed mind will always think that they can do it by their principals.
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A rejection of humanism in African moral tradition
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that the best account of the foundations of morality in the African tradition should be grounded on some relevant spiritual property -a view that they call ethical supernaturalism.