Reflections on the Global Environmental Crisis from Confucian and Ecological Perspectives
The global environmental crisis is one of the symptoms of modernity. The whole modern civilization is anti-ecological, and the global ecological crisis is caused by the global expanding of modern civilization. From a point of view of ecology, we can definitely judge that modern civilization with “mass production, mass consumption, and mass wastes” is unsustainable. Because ancient Chinese civilization remained as agricultural civilization, a kind of eco-civilization, it was sustained for a long time. Confucianism made a special contribution to ancient Chinese civilization. We cannot, of course, go back to ancient eco-civilization, but we can learn a lot from our ancestors when we try to construct a new eco-civilization in the future. We can benefit from valuable suggestions from Confucianism while correcting the mistakes of modernity. A new eco-civilization will also need to inherit good elements from modern western civilization.