Ethics and the environment

Abstract

A review is made of one of many aspects that relate ethics and environment: the reports made by experts at the request of administrations, judges or corporations with the goal to have supposedly well-founded data to manage, judge or undertake various activities on the natural environment. Often these reports are not as technical as they should be, or are not taken into account, or have to compete with other equally technical reports from experts who say the opposite. Several case studies are briefly cited (the Castor submarine and underground gas storage facility, the piles of saline tailings of the Bages region, the Segarra-Garrigues water canal, the mine tailings of Portmán, the oil spill of the Aegean Sea tanker, and several others) as examples of unethical actions of the informants, requesters or recipients of these reports. As the environment provides irreplaceable ecosystem services, it is suggested that we should be more scientific and more careful: ours is an ethical and moral species, and the principle should prevail in our acts – both from ordinary citizens and professional ones – that the common good (the protection of nature) should be placed above the particular good (the right to the enjoyment or exploitation of nature), and of course above material profit.

Keywords: expert reports, Castor gas storage facility, saline tailing of the Bages region, Segarra-Garrigues water canal, mine tailings of Portmán, oil spill, common good, protection of nature.