What does it mean to take the life of an animal or a plant? How far does our ethical and moral responsibility extend to life other than ourselves? And what happens when we don’t accept responsibility? And how do we learn to act with greater and greater sensitivity to our environment? Hello and welcome to Matter and Beyond, I'm Laura Wells. Meet Dr. John Grim of Yale University, he’s part of a growing number of scholars who assume responsibility for saving the planet. He emphasizes that in order to overcome the current challenges, science, education, social, and environmental policy, ethics and religion must collaborate, although each one is necessary, none of them is efficient on its own, with it's great achievement throughout history, humanity has reason to be hopeful.
Male Host: For Dr. Grim environmental crisis is a primary motivating factor in his work and outlook on life.
Dr. John Grim: In my own field and in this study that Mary Evelyn Tucker and I have initiated this question of environmental crisis is really a crucial core inside into what motivates us. But of course, that phrase environmental crisis covers such a broad are.
Male Host: The impeding environmental crisis makes us highly aware of the availability and use of elements that surround us.
Dr. John Grim: We begin to grow aware in ways that we have not in earlier centuries of uses of water, and that availability of water and so that it awakens in human an understanding of water connected to the older say symbolic uses that I'm familiar with in the world religions and also scientific understanding of water.
Male Host: Global warming, in particular, captures that retention. Knowledge of climate change is not limited to scientist in the academic community, its effects all too apparent in daily life.
Dr. John Grim: And of course, the a sense now that we have of these global issues of climate change, of population pressures that we have began to realize the dimension of the environmental crisis in ways that even 20th century, from the middle of the 20th century when this began to surface more clearly for us, now we see the problems and we experience these problems in a totally different way.
Male Host: The environmental crisis brings to the forefront important moral questions that demand answers. In every culture, the preservation of life in central. The threat to life that the environmental crisis brings requires that we rethink certain fundamental and ancient questions to reflect the fact that everyone is involved in the threat to life, whether they're aware of it or not.
Dr. John Grim: Namely, what does it mean to take a life. And the fact that they have thought about this, the eating of life, and that relationship in the so-called civilizations, the civilizations we often associate with the world religions. We find reflection on that life taking also.
Male Host: Dr. Grim explains that pollution, diminishing fresh water supplies and pervasive chemical residue need to be place in our thinking about what can be considered the death of biodiversity, the taking of life on a broad scale. Interestingly enough, in the religious tradition especially, but we might say even broadly speaking in the human family, we have developed rules and perspective with regards to life and life taking. The legal protects human life, international laws and public policy regulate how we treat wildlife. But now, we face a broader and more elusive taking of life that we are struggling to halt.
Dr. John Grim: Homicide and suicide and even of late we find reflection on genocide, but only recently have we began to think about ecocide or genocide, or the sense o biocide. We are engaged in the shutting down of life patterns, life expressions on the planet in a way that does not happen for some million of years, if not 65 millions years.
Male Host: Scientist suggest that the previous extinction period that took place million of years ago, that brought the dinosaurs to an end was the result of asteroid or other catastrophic natural event. Now, we are facing another mass extinction of species that is caused by another direct influence.
Dr. John Grim: But now humans are that strike. We are the ones who are involved in the deeming down of life and it's that relationship to life that we have not even come to a series reflection upon the principles, within the different religions or within the different human communities. What are the principles that would awaken us to that deeming down of like our human extinction of life on the planet, seems to me that’s part of what's emerging and that we’re seeing happen is this reflection upon human relationship with life and that deleterious, a denature of that relation is deleterious for the community of life.
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