Abstract

Adaptive success and evolution are determined by how we interact with the natural environment and all other forms of life. Yet in our pursuit to dominate the natural world, we have lost sight of this basic premise and continue to exploit natural resources, to contaminate, to consume more than necessary and to misuse our reproductive capacities. For this reason, global bioethics emerged in the 1980s, a culmination of mental resistance on the part of many observers who sought to readdress the balance between humankind and nature – a balance which must be reinstated if we are to survive. Corrective measures are required, which should be free from purely religious or political influences because their ideologies are frequently founded on strategies of power, with little regard for the general well-being of all living species. Global bioethics, as opposed to bioethics, was formulated by myself, Van Rensselaer Potter, Antonio Moroni, Laura Westra and others, to transcend the restraints of science, uniting it with the humanities to create a new expanded consciousness, an alliance between life and the environment in which all factors – environmental, biological, physical, psychological, social and economic – recognize that they are inderdependent.