Dear All - this is a suggestion about how EarthOS may show its face(s). I am preparing a contribution for a conference in May 2020 in Porto (PT)– the ‘Geoethics & Groundwater Management Congress’. I think that this event could be interesting for EarthOS (submission of abstracts by 15th November, full-paper publication with Springer). In that context I would be happy if we could join forces. See below my current outline [*] that I am willing to open; what would be one option. best regards, Martin
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Geoethics for Operating in the Human Niche
Geosciences co-shape the human niche; hence geoethical thinking is pertinent for any geoscientist. Within the human niche, geo-endowments, like water, are a shared resource. As societal context, the human niche is a planetary network of natural and cultural landscapes. They are knotted by global supply chains and restlessly alter through engineering, production and consumption. Entangled by them, human agents face counter-intuitive system-behaviour, irreversible path-dependency and multi-facet values and interests. Geoethical thinking explores cultural substrates that would nurture the skills of agents and their operational circumstances when facing suchlike system-features.
Initially, geoscientists conceived geoethics for their professional functions in various societal and scientific contexts. Subsequently, geoethics evolved into an epistemic, moral hybrid for citizens interacting with the Earth system. Furthering geoethics – combining it with Kohlberg’s hierarchy of moral adequacy and Jonas’s imperative of responsibility – results in a ‘geoethical rational’, namely, to act: ‘actor-centric, virtue-ethics focused, responsibility focused, knowledge-based, all-actor-inclusive, and universal-rights based’ .
The geoethical rationale, formulated at a normative meta-level, is designed to apply in any societal or scientific context that is relevant for geosciences, modulated in a case-specific manner. The geoethical rationale supports agents (geoscientists, citizens) to navigate the human niche, framing how to handle its diversity.