A 196 page essay, Ethics for a finite world : An essay concerning a sustainable future, summarized for those who may not get around to reading it:
Continual growth is impossible in any finite domain.
Should individuals or societies steadily increase their exploitation of the finite ecosystem supporting them; that system, regardless of the causes or ideals which drive the individuals, will eventually collapse.
For the first time on a global scale human beings are exceeding the sustainable land and resource availability of the Earth.
If a sustainable equilibrium cannot be maintained, then the step-by-step destruction of the Earth's ecosystems will remain the persisting – and eventually tragic characteristic of human activity.
All ethical behavior must be relative to the protection and sustenance of the Earth's diverse yet mutually supporting systems of all living things.
An acceptable system of ethics is contingent on its ability to preserve the ecosystems which sustain it.
The stability and well-being of the Earth's biosystem has moral priority over the welfare of any of its parts, including the needs and interests of human societies and individuals in those societies.
The environment is unlikely ever to be protected when all are free to use as much energy and to consume as many goods and services as they can afford and while society honors the moral obligation to supply the material necessities to everyone who lacks them.
People's first moral duty is to live as responsible and sustaining members of the world's community of living things.
Nature controls any exuberant species either by drastically reducing its population or by its extinction.
Material demands are constrained by the limited resource use which the bio-system can sustain. Exceeding this carrying capacity will cause that system to collapse into a simpler state.
The additional stress of continued growth will make the system collapse suddenly and without warning.
There is no assurance that people have the will and the intelligence to live within the necessary limits of nature.
The march of events toward biological tragedy is being driven by the excessive consumption of the wealthy industrialized nations.
When the majority of the people come to accept the modern economic ideal of a steady increase in their wealth and consumption, a collapse of the commons which sustains them is inevitable.
Society must discover controls to prevent unlimited growth in population.
Population is likely to remain unstable as long as individuals are free to have as many children as they want while society at large has the moral obligation to pay for food, medical care, schools, and the increase in sanitary and employment facilities necessary to support those children.
Exhorting people voluntarily to protect the environment and to reduce their fertility is not an empirically effective means for accomplishing necessary goals.
Necessary coercion need not be tyranny. On the contrary, effective coercion is a necessary condition for having enduring freedom for all.
Societally enforced constraint is necessary to prevent the tragic breakdown of the Earth's bio-system.
The continuing increase in the exploitation of the Earth's limited resources is aggregating the stresses already placed on the Earth's ecosystems. The end point will be the rapid loss of the Earth's ability to support human society in its present form.
There is no assurance that people have the will and the intelligence to live within the limits of nature.
The ethical principles here noted illustrate how far apart Homo sapiens is today from ethical/survival reality. A reason for this is that our relationship to Planet earth is greatly influenced by several thousand years of deeply embedded images that have helped us distinguish between “right” and “wrong,” between what is “lawful” and what is not “lawful” and they are so deeply embedded in our group psyche that even those individuals who profess not to believe in their validity and usefulness find themselves under their control.
The world is in need of a new survivalist ethics calling for us to question them. It is self-evident that any and all behavior that does not further the continuance of humans on Planet earth must be considered unethical. An increasingly damaged planet is crying out for sweeping and permanent change in the way we view our relationship to it. We are being called to experience a metamorphosis, a change in the way we think.
Our survival cannot take place without reinvention in all of the areas of our religious, social, economic and political thought and their supporting structures. This is not to say that all past thought and the structures supporting that thought should be discarded. But there needs to be a far reaching human synthesis built on a reconstituted human ethic. It must be global.