Well, animal welfare is, in an obvious sense, related to environmental ethics, since animals are found in the natural environment, and therefore are a part of the concerns of the environmentalists. According to principle three, humans, for instance, do not have a right to diminish the richness and diversity of the natural world beyond humans, except in order to satisfy a pressing need.
The expansion of moral status, however, has been made with respect to not only the non-human natural world, but also with respect to humans that have yet to come into existence. The granting of moral standing to future generations has been seen as necessary due to the fact that many ecological problems, such as climate change and resource depletion, will impact future humans far more than many ecological problems impact current ones. A core issue of earlier technological revolutions has been the ease with which we took to giving rights to healthy natural systems, such as forests, oceans, river basins (all undergirded and sustained by biodiversity), instead of value healthy natural systems, such as forests, as necessary conditions of development.
First, because of technological limitations, human understanding of natural laws is less than adequate, leading to formation of such perspectives as unsustainable production and consumption; but technical limitations imply, on one hand, lower efficiency in the use of resources, leading to greater resource service inputs to meet same demands, and on the other, an insufficient capacity for humans to enhance the services provided by environmental systems. First, advances in science and technology may allow humans to understand natural laws more comprehensively, to know more about the interactions of environmental and human economic societies, and may contribute to humans forming a conception of sustainable production and consumption. Technological innovations can improve unit-satisfaction efficiencies in resources, minimise the consumption of resources per unit of human well-being, and thus improve natures provisioning capacity, thereby favouring sustainable use.
Among necessary supports such as instruments, technical innovation and systems assurance are the deepest measures for building ecological environments capacity to serve. Clearly, the appropriate solutions cannot simply lie in better management or a more rational use of earth’s resources, as important as those might be. Changes in the provisioning services can influence supply of various materials, and, because of diminishing resources, may potentially generate conflicts; changes in regulation services will influence laws, frequency, and the allocation of various types of disasters; differences in ecological environments themselves can also generate differences in religious rites or in spiritual character, affecting relations between the various nationalities in the community.
Religious belief systems explain advances vis-a-vis the limits set by God, as well as the effects of technologies on spiritual and social well-being for individuals and communities, or non-human environments. As technologies have more and more manipulated the most fundamental components of life, they have had an effect on core human values. The technological essence has benefits; engaging with it makes us feel good, activating our inborn biophilia, the term for mankind’s primal, inherent connection to its surroundings.
