Environmental ethics are a set of norms that a society accepts as a foundation for mediating and guiding their behavior towards the environment. In Western society, we have used our science, as well as other traditions (e.g. capitalist economics, humaneness, aesthetics), to form the foundation of our environmental behavior. We are in the midst of a search for new ethical foundations. Deep ecology has offered one possible route, Eastern religions have been another source for advancing our ethics, and yet none of these has proved palatable in our Western social systems.

Western science has guided the environmental interactions of our society which in turn has dominated global development processes, but this pattern has some definite shortcomings. While science has served to develop our understanding of nature and enhanced our knowledge of the ecological difficulties that we have created for ourselves, the...