ABSTRACT
The challenge of the next millennium will be to contain those cultures within the carrying capacity of the larger community of life on the authors's home planet. This chapter examines rights and responsibilities in an Earth ethics. It seeks to balance appropriately ethics and biology, law and natural history, nature and culture, human and natural values. The chapter explores whether the concept of rights, so important in recent Western ethics and law, is useful in conserving nature, and concludes that the concept of rights has limited usefulness in this respect. It also examines human responsibility to protect natural values, including the responsibilities to protect life, species, ecosystems and, ultimately. The chapter highlights that political citizenship tends to fragment these Earth-oriented responsibilities and concludes that people need to be residents of Earth as much as citizens of nations. People must develop an Earth ethics in order to elevate urgent ecological concerns to the forefront of human thought and action.
