Geoethics, a Branding for Sustainable Practices

Abstract

In struggles for cultural leadership, advocating a paradigm helps to disseminate, for example, a style of life, thinking, or common practices. Promoting a practice, that is, branding it, includes the use of a simple name or symbol (semiotic sign). Within geosciences, the label “geoethics” refers to a school of thought that uses established philosophical concepts to promote responsible professional practices. The outcomes that are available aggregate to a more general paradigm that calls for geocentric human practices. The label geoethics also sounds like a brand for those practices. As analysis shows, the notion of geoethics is not univocal. At first sight, that feature hinders using it as a brand for geocentric practices. However, the successful branding of the concept of sustainability, as a scientific and public paradigm, indicates the opposite. Although the notion of sustainability aggregates various concepts and is not univocal, it illustrates what cultural leadership can be achieved when a concept, paradigm, and brand use the same semiotic sign (name). Therefore, it is suggested that the school of thought, Geoethics, with its dedicated reference to the specific societal use of geosciences, should also be used as a brand: geoethics, the general application of geoethical thinking to promote geocentric human practices.

Shaping the Noosphere: Geoethical values and spiritual resistance in Terres de l’Ebre, Catalonia, Spain

“…In Terres de l'Ebre, the concept of "Ebrenc", as replacing the old concept of "tortosinisme", may foster a common ground to overcome tragedies of geoethical dilemmas. Being "Ebrenc", as a geoethics branding for sustainable practices (Bohle & Marone, 2021) and heading to ecological justice and tacking integral poverty, could easily be put at the core of civic entrepreneurship, social cooperativeness, private stewardship initiatives, spurred by community unionism and re-municipalization as being key towards deliberative democracy. In other words, the current consumer-social contract must be replaced by a socioecological contract (Jennings, 2016), based on an ecological dialogue of values that fosters a shared future, and triggers cultural change by taking solidarity identity values as a principle to preserve ecosystems and their communities, their natural and cultural heritage, inspiring Geosphere-based Solutions.…”

Phronesis at the Human-Earth Nexus: Managed Retreat

“…The specific research question of this essay is how geoscienceinformed philosophies may support designing policies for adaptation to anthropogenic global change. To approach the question, we start from what we -as geoscientists in the broader sense -have in hand, that is, a bulk of corroborated empirical evidence and recent developments in geo-philosophical concepts (Peppoloni et al, 2019;Bohle and Marone, 2021;Marone and Bouzo, 2021).…”

Geoethics to Start Up a Pedagogical and Political Path towards Future Sustainable Societies

“…The contextualization of practices and interventions is a fundamental characteristic of geoethics, which in Peppoloni et al is called as a relativism of geoethics [2] and in Bohle and Marone as a pluralism of geoethics [14]. This feature ensures a variety of approaches and modes of action within a shared framework of geoethical values.…”

“…Geoethics [1,2], precisely because of its theoretical structure that is rooted in the geoscientific knowledge of the characteristics and dynamics of complex social-ecological systems [3][4][5][6], must question itself on the idea of a future human civilization, being nourished by ideals and carried out through a scientifically founded operational pragmatism. This implies that studies in the field of geoethics are enriched by and integrated with economic, sociological, legal, and human sciences reflections [7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16]. These reflections must not distort the essence of geoethics [2,[16][17][18] but must complete its operational interface, so that from a long-term cultural project, geoethics can more rapidly transform into a pedagogical program and a political manifesto to also act and become effective in the short term.…”