Immediate dependence on local habitat once made conservation self-interested

Evidence

In times past, people were highly dependent on their immediate habitat for their livelihoods. This tight contingency strongly linked behavioral practices to environmental consequences. It was, therefore, in people’s self-interest to conserve their environment and learn to live in harmony with it. These efforts were often backed up with ethical prescripts and normative sanctions. In contemporary societies, most of the peoples of the world live under congested urbanized conditions where they must harmonize more with a constructed concrete environment than with the natural world. The constructed environment feeds and clothes them, and provides clean water supplies, countless labor-saving devices, and the energy needed to power a high-tech lifestyle. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2527

In times past, people were highly dependent on their immediate habitat for their livelihoods. This tight contingency strongly linked behavioral practices to environmental consequences. It was, therefore, in people’s self-interest to conserve their environment and learn to live in harmony with it. These efforts were often backed up with ethical prescripts and normative sanctions. In contemporary societies, most of the peoples of the world live under congested urbanized conditions where they must harmonize more with a constructed concrete environment than with the natural world. The constructed environment feeds and clothes them, and provides clean water supplies, countless labor-saving devices, and the energy needed to power a high-tech lifestyle. — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement, 2527

Categorization

• SEED: Essay angle: how the shift from living IN to living ON the habitat erodes the moral basis for conservation, and whether ‘self-interest in local habitat’ was ever a reliable conservation mechanism.
• XREF: Connects to the logic in Parable of the Sower about communal survival tied to land stewardship. — connects to: Seasonal territory asserted by migrating birds overrides documented human ownership — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 134; Unrestricted market hunting nearly extirpated the upland plover from Wisconsin farms — Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac: With Other…, 137; Conservationist ideas carried into environmentalism through an urbanized land ethic — Adam Rome, The Bulldozer in the Countryside:…, 44 (+1 more)
• corroborated: 3 independent passages support this claim — Albert Bandura, Moral Disengagement: How People Do Harm…, 2527