The environment and materials, from the standpoints of ethics, social sciences, law and politics
Authors: Birat Jean-Pierre 
Published: March 2019

Materials are deeply connected with the environment, because they stem from raw materials extracted from the geosphere, rely on large amounts of energy and of water in their production stage, project emissions to air, water and soil when their ores (or minerals) are mined, when they are made in steel mills or cement kilns, including very significant amounts of greenhouse gases. They also contribute to emissions and energy consumption of the artifacts of which they are part, either consumption or investment goods. Their connection with the biosphere raises many issues, in terms of toxicology, ecotoxicology or biodiversity or simply of public health or in the working place. Materials, as an essential part of the anthroposphere, interact deeply with the anthroposphere itself but also with the biosphere, the geosphere, the atmosphere and the hydrosphere, thus with nature in a general way through mechanisms which can no longer simply be described at the margin, as resource depletion or as pollution. This raises issues related to the sustainability of materials in human activities, in which they are deeply immersed and entangled. The standard way of dealing with these environmental issues is to invoke sustainability and to explain that all actors are engaged in sustainable development, a morals or an ethics that points in which direction to go: all players in the materials field, industry, institutions and research, claim allegiance to sustainable development. At a more technical level, specific tools like Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) are used extensively to measure the interaction of materials with the environment. This, however, is not enough to deal properly with the environmental issues of materials, because these issues are not marginal any longer: the anthroposphere has become so large with respect to the biosphere, the geosphere and the planet in general that environmental risk is now part of modern life, especially in connection with climate change and the loss of biodiversity. To go deeper in analyzing the connection of human activities with nature, it is therefore necessary to reach out to SSH (Social Science and Humanities) disciplines and particularly to environmental ethics. This is a prerequisite for materials scientists (and others) to act decisively in the future in the face of the danger that lies ahead of us. The present paper reviews the advances of environmental ethics, a fairly young discipline born in the 1970s, in as far as it can help all actors on the world anthropospheric theater choose their lines for the future in a more conscious and sophisticated way than simply claiming obedience to sustainability. We will review briefly intellectual forerunners of the discipline like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Henri David Thoreau, Rachel Carson or Paul Ehrlich. This will help flesh out well-known concepts like the precautionary principle or the “polluter-pays” principle, which are invoked in creating new materials or new processes to keep pollution and health issues under control, as part of the constraints of professional ethics but also of environmental law. It will be necessary to question to whom or to what the key concept of intrinsic value is attached: people, all living organisms or ecosystems, i.e. the environment in general, and thus to define anthropocentrism, biocentrism and ecocentrism. Environmental law and the ethics of sustainable development are still mainly anthropocentric while scientific ecology is more clearly ecocentric. To tackle the challenges of environmental issues as they are posed today and to avoid catastrophes, it might be necessary in the future for all social players and for people of the world of materials to follow the steps of environmental ethics and to move up from anthropocentrism to the broader vision of ecocentrism.