Scientific technology, life, the environment

Modern civilization is characterized by industrialization and advanced scientific technology. It has developed through this century, and as a result, it has brought us great benefits and conveniences. However it is also true that it has caused a number of problems and crises concerning our attitudes toward life and the environment.

Today we face, on the one hand, global environmental issues such as the destruction of the ozone layer, and on the other hand, ethical problems arising from medical technology such as those associated with freezing early human embryos that are only a few cells. We should regard these problems as a set of interconnected ethical-social issues, because all these matters have been caused by the fundamental invasion of scientific technology into the realm of ‘life’ on this planet.

I have elsewhere advocated ‘the study of life’ as a comprehensive approach to all the problems arising from our attitudes toward life, the life of humans and of all other living creatures (1). From the viewpoint of the study of life, a number of ethical and social problems of our age can be discussed at the same time in the same way.

For example, environmental pollution caused by chemical factories, clearly apparent to Japanese people in the 1960’s (in the Minamata and other cases), was one of the first instances which indicated that the conduct of modern scientific and industrial civilization had done structural harm to human life and local ecosystems. The growing global environmental crisis became more apparent [83/84] through the 1970’s and 80’s, and has become one of the most important international political issues in the 1990’s. The main cause of the environmental crisis lies in the fact that the industrialized nations have underestimated the interrelatedness of our life and biosphere on this planet when making plans for their own industrialization and development (2). All forms of life on the earth, including humans and non-human organisms, constitute complicated and interrelated networks. Interrelatedness of this kind is one of the essential features of the images and concept of life (inochi) as we shall discuss later in this paper.

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The Concept of Inochi (life) (1991)
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