Geoethics to Start Up a Pedagogical and Political Path towards Future Sustainable Societies

Silvia Peppoloni and Giuseppe Di Capua
Additional contact information
Silvia Peppoloni: Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, International Association for Promoting Geoethics, 40128 Bologna, Italy
Giuseppe Di Capua: Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia, International Association for Promoting Geoethics, 40128 Bologna, Italy

Sustainability, 2021, vol. 13, issue 18, 1-20

Abstract: The development of geoethics is at a turning point. After having strengthened its theoretical structure and launched new initiatives aimed at favouring the spread of geoethical thinking, geoethics must deal with some issues concerning the social organization of dominant cultures, the existing economic structures, and the political systems that govern the world. Nowadays geoethics must move towards the construction of a pedagogical proposal, which has a formative purpose, for future generations and the policy leaders, but also a political one, in the noble sense of the term, that is, concerning the action of citizens who take part in public life. The pedagogical and political project of geoethics will have to be founded on the principles of dignity, freedom, and responsibility on which to ground a set of values for global ethics in order to face planetary anthropogenic changes. Furthermore, this project must be inclusive, participatory, and proactive, without falling into simplistic criticism of the current interpretative and operational paradigms of the world, but always maintaining realism (therefore adherence to the reality of the observed facts) and a critical attitude towards the positive and negative aspects of any organizational socio-economic system of human communities. In our vision there can be no sustainability, adaptation, or transition in human systems that do not pass through an ethical regeneration of the human beings, who are aware of their inborn anthropocentric and anthropogenic perception/position and assume responsibility for the consequences of their actions impacting the Earth system. In fact, the ecological crisis is the effect of the crisis of humans who have moved away from their intimate human nature. Through this paper we want to enlarge disciplinary areas that should be investigated and discussed through the lens of geoethical thinking and propose geoethics for an ethical renewal of societies, making them more sustainable from a social, economic, and environmental perspectives.

Keywords: geoethics; sustainable societies; ecological humanism; ecological crisis; anthropocentric view; responsibility (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/18/10024/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/18/10024/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:13:y:2021:i:18:p:10024-:d:630816

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().