Ekologiczna płaszczyzna troski o życie i zdrowie

Abstract

The paper seeks to show one of the most important levels of responsibility for man’s life and health, i.e. the concern about the natural environment. It is true that the importance of the natural environment is today quite commonly well-known and approved, but the „ecological awareness” is sometimes limited to the concern about the natural environment itself without being open to the sense of responsibility for man and his life. Therefore the author points first to a necessity to combine the question of ecology with the concern about human life, referring oneself to the creative-salvational perspective in viewing man, the value of life and the value of the natural environment. This necessity becomes today the more clear, the more people are aware that contemporary threats to the natural environment, its destruction and excessive exploitation, which more or less directly affect the quality of human life, and ultimately affect its survival. In this context the author considers the principal ethical postulates addressed at the „ecological” concern about life and health. The concern about life and health on the ecological level is manifested by many practical attitudes and actions which go far beyond the individual level of responsibility and call for cooperation among people, communities, and on the global scale. The combination of the concern about life and health with the concern about the natural environment allows us to overcome two inappropriate tendencies which may easily steal into the sphere of bioethics and ecology. On the one hand, it is necessary to refute such a vision of responsibility for life and health which would disregard or completely omit the ecological questions. On the other hand, one should discard the ideologized approach to the ecological problem which goes so far to concentrate on the „defence” of the natural environment that it fails to perceive a particular place of man within the environment, thereby reducing him merely to one of the many elements of biosphere, or else - in radical approaches - treats man (each man) as a threat to the environment. Christians are called to be responsible for the natural environment. They should place it within a broader and more profound perspective from which to recognize the value of life, especially human life, thus discovering its close relationship with the concern about human life and health. They take up this responsibility with full awareness that they should not give in to the attempts at a false „sacralization” of the natural environment, nor to the tendencies to negate the contemporary world in the spirit of an illusory dream to go back to a kind of „lost paradise” Being aware of any threats brought about for man and his environment by the contemporary technological progress and its consumer mentality, Christians do not stand today in a blind opposition to progress, but in opposition to blind progress.