Human impact: the ethics of I=PAT

The I=PAT equation sets Human Impact on the environment  (I) equal to the product of Population (P), Affluence (A), and Technology (T). Embedded in this equation are a multitude of ethical issues surrounding “how we treat our life-support systems, how we treat other people directly, and how we treat people and other organisms through our impacts on the environment”. Yet the ethics of the human predicament are almost never part of public discourse.  Paul R. Ehrlich presents a sample of some of these issues with the hope that doing so will provoke discourse of the ethics of the realities represented by the I=PAT equation.

ABSTRACT: Global change, driven by increasing levels of human population, growing consumption by the rich, and poor choices of technologies and social arrangements to supply that consumption, have generated a suite of environmental problems that threaten civilization. This in turn has brought to the fore a daunting array of ethical issues that, sadly, are not being widely addressed. I sample some of these and discuss them in a way that hopefully will generate some of the needed discourse.