ABSTRACT
No individual scientific discipline can make the claim of being able to autonomously lay the foundation for environmental education. Nonetheless, there are two disciplines that occupy a particularly prominent position: ecology and economics. This position does not fall to them for reasons of their terminology, their axioms or their methods, but rather because their objects are essentially the same as those of environmental education. Not by chance is the expression ‘ecological economics’1 well-known throughout the international scientific world as that field of research which deals with many of the most interesting questions in regard to humans, nature and the environment. The special significance of ecology and economics is revealed as soon as we take a closer look at the two terms themselves: ‘ecology’ and ‘economy’. Both share the component ‘eco’ which is derived from the ancient Greek word ‘oikos’, meaning ‘house’. Oikos does not only mean the building itself, however, but refers to everything that can be better summarised under the term ‘household’. The household of a farm – at least as it was understood in ancient Greece – incorporated, apart from the inhabited buildings, all the stalls, pastures and fields, including the people and animals living therein. So what does ‘oiko-nomia’ mean? Here we must turn our attention to the expression ‘nomos’, from which the second syllable ‘-nomy’ in ‘economy’ is derived. Nomos is also an ancient Greek expression meaning ‘law’: an established or implemented order, be it of human or divine origin. Thus nomos is an order which does not simply exist of its own accord, but must be implemented at some point in time by a law-giving authority or through a contractual agreement. The term ‘nomos’ is derived from the verb ‘nemein’, which means to pasture or graze. How are the law and the pasturing or grazing of domestic animals correlated? Among the oldest orders that humans had to establish among themselves was the division of pasture areas and the allotment of fertile lands by a higher authority – for example, a lord or a council assembly. Nomos is therefore the law in the sense of the establishment of principles for the concrete ordering of the division and allotment of rights and goods within a human society. The ordering of division and allotment is always associated with the questions: who
has claim to what? Who deserves this, who deserves that? Who is to receive more, who less? In other words: when is a partition just and when is it not? Reflections on nomos lead to questions of a just legislation – nomos belongs in the sphere of justice. In regard to the oikos, the term ‘nomos’ is limited to the community of those who belong to the household. When speaking of oikonomia – the expression first turned up roughly 500 years bc – we are therefore dealing with the order of the household. The ancient Greek household was patriarchal: the lord was the head of the household and the running of the house was in his hands. It was his right and duty to apportion the household tasks and allocate them to family members, servants and maids. He had to regulate the deployment of animals and tools and decide how money was to be earned and spent. It was furthermore his duty to distribute the acquired goods (in so far as he did not decide to save them) among the people and animals in his charge. In regard to the allotment of work and goods in the house, oikonomia meant the just and economically wise running of the household. The measure for the justice and economic wisdom in this sense were the needs and performances of those living in it. It was towards them that the nomos, the established order, had to be fair. Throughout ancient times as well as in the Middle Ages, the expression oikonomia or its Latin form economia retained this meaning. In modern times the ‘house’ that economics deals with is no longer one single household. Towards the beginning of the seventeenth century the expression ‘Économie Politique’, political economics,2 emerged in France. Now the oikos incorporated the entire state. Economics dealt accordingly with the entire state and the questions of apportion and allotment within it: how can the greatest possible amount be produced and how should that amount be distributed? Thus economy came to mean the production of wealth and prosperity for the state. At the end of the eighteenth century the analysis of economic systems and their dynamics increasingly became the focal point. The object of economics has since been the interactions on markets on which the transaction of goods and services takes place. The transformation of the economy from household economy to market economy as it began in early modern times was thus emulated by economics. Nonetheless, the meaning of ‘the correct running of the household’ still echoes in the expression. Today we find ourselves confronted with questions of the global economy: here we are dealing with the just order of a household which incorporates the whole Earth and the entire global community. Such questions do not concern only economic science, but equally all other human and social disciplines. Moreover, they concern every person who takes an interest in the times he or she lives in. In democratic states it is the task of emancipated citizens to assist in assuring that these states contribute as much as they possibly can to a proper management of the Earth’s household. It is this household that environmental education particularly deals with. From this point of view, the ‘house’ is the current economy of the whole Earth. The fundamental questions of an economy in the sense of environmental
education include questions of an appropriate allotment in a specific manner: how are the Earth’s resources, and how are human activities and the resultant products and services, to be apportioned? Don’t all people have a claim to them? Doesn’t that include those not yet born, and don’t other living creatures also have their own rights of existence and claim to the resources of the household of the Earth? In this manner questions in regard to the economy are questions of the household management of the Earth. In our observations on the economy we have been taking it as given that the way in which things are portioned and allotted – in other words, the nomos of the house, be it one house, a state or the entire Earth – is something dictated by human beings. As a rule, economy is an expression of an anthropocentric view of the world, a view that puts the human being (Greek: ‘anthropos’) in the centre. The whole house of the Earth is viewed from the perspective of people, their wants and interests. It appears as a house for people in which they lay their Nomoi, their orders, upon one another and all of nature. What does this mean for nature and what does it mean for people themselves? Can people distribute what they find according to their own will, and, if they so wish, consume it entirely? Or are there other orders, not dictated and established by humankind, to which the human nomos is subject? The consequences of a reckless subjugation of nature by humans can be seen, to name one example, in the Mediterranean. Since ancient times the forests in that area have been cut down, in particular for the construction of ships for war and trade, but also for the framework and beams of buildings, firewood and wood coal for the smelting of iron and glass and ceramic production, etc. This was occasioned by the economy of the time with a certain inevitability, similar to the fact that livestock, and goats in particular, were turned out to graze in the deforested areas, destroying any new shoots right down to their roots. The goats multiplied, ran wild and ensured that (in so far as erosion didn’t carry away the soil altogether, leaving only naked rock) nothing more than a little undergrowth could develop. Thus the entire animal and plant life of the region was given an entirely new face, and the region suffers under the consequences of the irreplaceably lost forests till today. Such observations can be found as early as the time of Plato (429-347 bc). An immoderate reign over nature was also disparaged in Roman poetry, for example in the poems of Virgil (70-19 bc) and Horace (65-8 bc). These poets indicated that humankind, in setting the standards of the household order of the Earth according to its own wants and interests, could possibly be offending against a higher divine order. Only recently, however, have people begun to occupy themselves with the order of non-human natural communities in a systematic and scientific manner. This occupation bears the name ecology.
