African Spirituality and the Environment: Some Principles, Theses, and Orientations

Abstract

“Something stands and something else stands beside it” (Ife kwulu ife ak-wudebe ya). The wisdom of this Igbo saying has perhaps never been as needed as it is today, particularly with regards to environmental ethics. If the capitalist, consumerist ethics has for approximately the last two hundred years been prominent in European and later in world political, economic and social interactions, many knowledgeable and responsible people realise today that absolutising it as the world economic order has brought with it perilous consequences for the cosmos. There is sufficient evidence to show that for humanity to survive it must now and an alternative ethic. I here advance several principles, theses, and orientations founded on and derived from African spirituality as the “something else” that might stand beside contemporary attitudes of careless and dangerous exploitation of the world.