EURO-ECO 2011 Hanover 21 - 22 November 2011	Environmental, Engineering - Economic and Legal Aspects for Sustainable Living
	European Academy of Natural Sciences, Hanover European Scientific Society, Hanover University of Bremen, Bremen

Home

Abstracts EURO-ECO

Contact

Disclaimer

The environmental crisis means that the contradictions between the economical interests of society in the consumption of natural resources and ecological requirements become aggravated. The notion of the environmental crisis is treated within the range of principles of both a philosophical approach and a pragmatic, applied one. Generally, one singles out a natural and a social constituent in the structure of the environmental crisis. The natural constituent consists in the degradation, destruction of the natural surroundings of man. To the social constituent often refers the inability of state and public organizations to stop the process of destroying the environment, to eliminate the negative consequences of it, to take measures improving the condition of nature. Such a treatment of the social aspect, however, appears to be in some degree limited. It is accounted by the fact that the social constituent also includes respective characteristics of the people’s health influenced by the environment, by the system of measures protecting this health, by the standards of living, by medicine and other factors providing both optimum conditions of living and a healthy way of life.

Theoretical grounds for the social constituent of the ecological policy are represented by the study of V. I. Vernadsky dealing with the biosphere and inevitability of its evolutional development into the sphere of man’s mind – the noosphere. It is possible to carry out the strategy if the major processes in the biosphere are governed by mind, i.e. under the co-development of man, society and nature controlled in a reasonable way, while the satisfaction of vital demands of people taking place without damage to the interests of future generations.

Coevolution is treated as a new paradigm of the 21^st century. It is supposed to affect the change of cognitive orientation and value preferences, a new perception of nature and approval of the new moral habits in the minds of people. Conceptual apparatus needs changing as well, philosophy should play here a decisive role contributing to the ecological reorientation of scientific, socio-economic and technical solutions in the field of ecology.

The problems of demography connected with the surplus growth of population in certain regions, uneven density of the population, migration make an essential component of the social constituent of the environmental crisis. These problems are complicated by numerous social factors: old-fashioned national and religious traditions, spontaneity in the allocation and use of resources, contrasts in the distribution of national wealth and so on. Thus, the social constituent of the environmental crisis is woven into the broader context of social problems of modern society. For example, the steady increase in the development of different forms of territorial migration brings about the need to consider adaptation skills of the people who settle on new territories, the possibilities of matching and balancing ecological views of the residents and migrants. The question of influence of the character of the system of social relationship on the ecological consciousness remains less studied. It should be noted that the ethnical layers of the public consciousness also possess a certain potential to solve ecological problems.

In that way it is possible to overcome the environmental crisis provided only that the social component is comprehended and regarded.