Prof. em. Dr. Ernst-Ulrich von Weizsäcker - We shall need a new enlightenment – Balancing human development and environmental sustainability

Prof. em. Dr. Ernst-Ulrich von Weizsäcker
(former President of the Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy, Wuppertal; Co-President Club of Rome) 
We shall need a new enlightenment – Balancing human development and environmental sustainability

Business as usual leads into ecological disasters. We are destroying our common home, says Pope Francis. In effect, our thinking is wrong, fundamentally wrong. The Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th Century was great – for its time. Its time was still the time of the “empty world” (Herman Daly). You could go out into the endless seeming nature and hunt and fish and dig and cut. Today, we are living in a “full world”. Laws and morale from the empty world no longer fit. And some of the tenets of the earlier Enlightenment have led to individualism, selfishness, greed, market dominance, short-termism and the rest. In the full world, we need balance in the first place. Balance be-tween long term and short term, between public goods and private gains, between mar-kets and the State, between individualism and solidarity, between analytical details and comprehension of the whole, and between feminine and masculine virtues. A New Enlightenment is meant to lead to a fundamental overhaul of our morale and legal structures. It is meant to include the long-term perspective of cultivating our physical and biological environment. It is meant to respect the needs of our great-grandchildren.

Quelle: E. U. von Weizsäcker

Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker was Professor of Biology, University of Essen; President of the University of Kassel; Director at the UN Centre for Science and Technology for De-velopment in New York; Director of the Institute for European Environmental Politics, Bonn; and President of the Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy, Wuppertal. Von Weizsäcker was also a member of the German Bundestag from 1998 until 2005 and taught at the University of California between 2006 and 2008. In 2008, he was awarded the German Environmental Award. Since 2012 von Weizsäcker has been the Co-President of the Club of Rome. He is the author of several books, for example “Faktor Fünf: Die Formel für nachhaltiges Wachstum”.