Abstract

The planet Earth will not have permanent ice cover at its North Pole by as soon as the summer of 2016, and by 2030 at the latest. Given this planetary reality, insights from the field of traditional ecological knowledge can be applied to humanity on a global scale, such that a global resource crisis will be felt before there will be a large-scale change in global environmental ethics and values, and that such a crisis will most likely precipitate a change in industrialized anthropogenic, climate-altering human lifestyles. Therefore, environmental ethics in the future will be an ethics shaped by living on a planet without a northern ice cap, and a rapidly dwindling southern ice cap. To prepare us for this scenario, we should cultivate an “ethics of immediacy,” and we should foster this ethic in ecosteries, where ethics of adaptation and resiliency can be put into practice so as a species we can deal with an entirely novel planetary future.