Building the bioethics tools of a community council to the future: the ecosystemic gap

Abstract

These are times of crisis. Recently, the COVID-19 pandemic and the resurgence of a form of Cold War raised international concerns about Health & Well-Being, Climate & Biodiversity, and Technology & Economy. Articulating bridges between disciplines, between cultures and between knowledges has never been more urgent to accelerate the translation of values and policies into actions. This comprehensive review argues for a radical ecosystemic approach to bridge the Medical & Environmental fields (studies, sectors, and technics) in an integrated management practice of Care, Production & Biodiversity. As bridging implies solving the epistemological gap, the argument emphasizes the need to raise awareness with theoretical hybridizations, fieldwork hypotheses, and working theories. According to Van Rensselaer Potter, who coined the term ‘bioethics’, awareness means to refocus the Medical & Environmental studies and surveillance processes from a target (e.g., the disease, the pathogen, or the resource) to its context (e.g., adding history, demography and ecology). Thus reframed, concerned researchers, leaders, and citizens should invest their effort in preparing the (contextual) terrain for ever-more organizational resilience. We conclude on the need for actions to shape the Health & Biodiversity determinants, to improve communication systems, data-sharing networks, and responsible innovations, and to foster knowledge translation to envision a better realistic future. “Ecology’s uneconomic, but with another kind of logic economy’s unecologic” (Potter 1988, p.9)