It's time to examine our moral values. Examine our attitudes as they relate to our natural world. Each of us needs to ask ourselves: What makes us really happy? What makes us feel secure? Has our striving for ever higher levels of materialistic consumption caused us to forget that we are living human beings? In the final analysis, we ultimately have much more in common with the plants, animals, air and water than we have with the mechanical, chemical and electronic world we have created around us.
The structures of property ownership and economic decision- making in our Western culture need to be examined as well. While our concepts of private property work reasonably well for ownership of real estate (land), they certainly are not working when applied to 'common global assets' such as air and water. Maybe we need to amend the Bill of Rights to guarantee the right of every individual to have clean air and water.
Property ownership structures in the forms of stock shares and corporations are not serving us well as far as environmental decision making goes. Corporations are not living organisms. They do not biologically reproduce and leave succeeding generations of offspring. They are not part of the natural biosphere. In spite of these obvious differences, they are treated in our laws as if they were real persons.
Why can't corporations make logical, sensible environmental decisions? At least two reasons are obvious. Since many are so large, there is always the chance that this great power will be abused, as it often is in the political arena. The second reason may be the fact mentioned above - corporations do not have biological children and grandchildren. There is no incentive in corporate decision making processes to plan for future generations' well-being, only the need to look toward the next quarterly report.
This is not to say that the corporate structure should be abolished - it just needs to be modified. The Valdez Principles are significant in that they attempt to do this. Certainly, as the events unfold in Eastern Europe, we realize that centrally planned economies are not the answer to either basic human needs or to the energy efficiency our world population must have if we are to continue our stay on this planet.
We have lost the balance between two Biblical concepts, one of "being good stewards" and the other of "multiplying our numbers and subduing the earth". It is clear that in the past, too much emphasis has been placed on the latter concept, and not nearly enough on the 'stewardship' idea. ***
