On Ecology Ethics And Its Education

Survival and development are the eternal theme that the human society faces. In a world of the 21st century, it is an unfortunate fact that the whole world ecological environment has deteriorated. China's ecosystem has also been very frail. The ecological environment issue has attracted worldwide attention because it threatens our survival and development.In front of the ecology crisis, to save our common homeland, many people have started to take actions. Many countries also start using administrative and legal power to constrain and penalize behaviors that destroy our natural environment. Unfortunately even with the development of environmental science and legislations, there are still massive phenomena of natural ecology destructions and legal violations, which intensify the worsening ecology. People gradually and painfully realized that the ecology crisis roots in humanity, namely our biased perception of nature, the conflict between human and nature, as well as among human beings, and the unawareness of ethic values. The problem is essentially a cultural and value one, not a technical and economical one. It is a problem of how to correctly choose and value our goals.Therefore, to solve ecological crisis and change the declining ecology, we have to call for ecology ethics. We must expand the domain of our old ethic principles and start using ethics to protect our nature. Our ethics need to adjust not only relations among people, but also relations between people and nature. This is going to be a profound change for our perception. We need to rethink our values and standards, restrain our own behaviors and activities, discipline our practices in nature and pursue a rational and balanced production and consumption. In another word, we are building a new culture, namely, ecology ethics.More than 200 years ago, the great French educator Thoreau pointed out that education is the most important enterprise that advances our humanity. Today, toface the ecology crisis, our education has a heavy responsibility. The practice of the ecology ethics education will certainly provides effective assistance for us to handle the crisis. As the hope and future of our nation, our youth is the key audience of the ecology ethics education. They are at a crucial stage to shape their ethic values, and our education can't afford to miss it. We need to let them know that human and nature should and could live in harmony and in the long run our society would enjoy nature and life a lot more if we build a behavior pattern that fits the environment.This article consists of four major parts:(I)The ecology ethics education outline. This part explains the content of ecology ethics and the education of them. It also introduces the new vision and new concepts that the ecology ethics education brings up.(II)A description of the deteriorating ecology, which motivates the education of ecology ethics for a sustainable development of the society.(III)A description of the present situation of the ecology ethics education and existing problems.(IV)In view of the present problems among the primary and middle school students, we propose the strategies of the ecology ethics education.