Sustainability and caring: a path to follow

Leonardo Boff

18/06/2011

Opinión

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I have been working for many years on the crisis of civilization that dangerously engulfs humanity. I have not been satisfied with the structural analysis of its causes, but through many writings I have tried to develop possible positive solutions, in terms of the values and principles that give real sustainability to the world that is to come. It helped a lot to participate in the development of the Earthcharter, which in my view is one of the most inspiring documents for the present crisis. It states: «our common destiny calls us to seek a new beginning: a new beginning that requires a change in the mind and heart, a new sense of global interdependence and of universal responsibility.»

I consider two values fundamental for this new beginning: sustainability and caring. Sustainability, discussed in my previous article, means the rational use of the Earth's scarce resources, without harming the natural capital, maintaining it in condition of auto-regeneration, so that future generations may also attend to their needs, because they also have the right to an inhabitable planet.

It is an activity that implies an economy respectful of the limits of each ecosystem and of the Earth herself, a society that seeks equity and world social justice and an environment sufficiently preserved to satisfy human needs.

As can be seen, sustainability affects society, politics, culture, art, nature, the planet and the life of each person. It is fundamental to guarantee the physical-chemical and ecological conditions that sustain the production and reproduction of life and of civilization. With increasing clarity, we affirm that our life style, now world-wide, is insufficiently sustainable. It is extremely hostile to life and excludes a great part of humanity. A perverse world social injustice dominates, with its terrible sequels, a fact that is generally forgotten when the subject of global warming is addressed.

The other category, as important as sustainability, is caring, about which I have written several studies. Caring implies a relationship with reality that is loving, respectful and non-aggressive, and therefore, non-destructive. It presupposes that human beings are part of nature and members of the biotic and cosmic community, with the responsibility to protect, regenerate, and care for her. More than a technique, caring is an art, a new paradigm of relationship with nature, with the Earth and with the human beings.

If sustainability represents the more objective, environmental, economic and social side of dealing with natural goods and their distribution, caring touches its more subjective side: the attitudes, the ethical and spiritual values that accompany that process, without which sustainability itself cannot occur, or is not guaranteed in the medium or long term.

Sustainability and caring must be jointly assumed to prevent the crisis from being transformed into tragedy, and to give efficacy to the practices that seek to create a new paradigm of human-being-life-Earth coexistence. The present crisis, with its grave, global threats that weigh on everyone, posits a philosophical questioning that cannot be postponed: what type of beings are we? Are we capable of degrading nature and endangering our own survival as a species, or better still, are we capable of taking responsibility and caring for our common future? What is, finally, our place on the Earth and what is our mission? Could it be that we must care for and preserve this sacred inheritance that the Universe and God gave us, this living Planet, that self regulates; and from whose womb we all come?

And here, once again, we resort to caring as a possible operative and essential definition of human being. Caring includes a certain way of being-in-the-world-with-the-others, and a determined praxis that protects nature. Not without reason, a philosophical tradition that comes to us from antiquity and culminates in Heidegger and Winnicott, defines the nature of the human being as a caring being. Without essential caring, the human being would not be here, nor the world that surrounds the human being. Sustainability and caring, together, show us the path to follow.

- Leonardo Boff, Theologian and Earthcharter Commission

Free translation from the Spanish sent by Melina Alfaro, done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU.

https://www.alainet.org/en/articulo/150597