ABSTRACT
As mortals, the Environmental Imperative seeks to express a pragmatic measure for human being in terms of survival-concern, contingency and finitude. What then unfolds is the ontological clearing of the mortals and their potential to create a hale world in sympathy with the earth. Given the imperatival nature of such a response in a time of environmental krisis, the mortals require an other ethos, and this means an other way of inhabiting the earth. But the way one has become accustomed to living on earth cannot, by itself, be transformed on the basis of a pragmatic response, since Technodasein's world informs the aesthetic and metaphysical dimensions of human experience. Being both mortal and Dasein, we are uniquely self-interpreting entities always ek-sisting in a finite and contingent world of meaning upon the earth. Mortal Dasein is at the centre of the environmental krisis, where a fundamental 'deciding' or judgement takes place and which can be made explicit through thought and praxis.
