




































JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY-4TH-EDITION (AQUINO)-2022


Abstract 

There has been a dominance of the anthropocentric orientation in science and 
technology, in economics and government thinking, in academia and among the world's 
religious traditions, with only an ambivalent support for ecocentrism through the history 
of thought (Taylor et al., 2016). Despite occasional admittance of the urgency of 
axiological paradigm shift by the UN it continues to confine itself to the anthropocentric 
framework in its assessment of environmental despoliation. This article demonstrates the 
inadequacy of UNEP's anthropocentric worldview by appraising its Environmental 
Assessment of Ogoniland (2011) in light ecocentric environmental philosophy. UNEP's 
assessment of what went wrong and what needs be done remains at the level of 
environmental law and fails to see the ethical failure antecedent to the ineffectiveness of 
environmental law in the form of existing oil company environmental guidelines. The 
objective is to underscore the failure of UNEP's assessment to espouse any remarkably 
different approach to human relation to the environment that promises protection for the 
ecosystem. For progress in confronting the challenge of environmental protection this 
article concludes with a recommendation that ecological ethics be emphasized in 
environmental education to broaden the axiological framework of environmental ethics 
accessible in academia and to government and private policy makers. 

Keywords: Ecocentric,  UNEP's , Environmental and  Ogoniland

Introduction 
Anthropocentrism continues to be the world's dominant philosophical framework, even 
in projects that spell out environmental sustainability and ethics as a stated
goal. A clear instance of this is UNEP's Environmental Assessment of Ogoniland (2011) 
which blames human destruction of the environment only as destruction of resources and 
recommends no ethical change of behaviour beyond prudential protection of the said 
resources on account of their value to the human community. Another critical example is 
the failure of the UN and educational policy makers across the world to introduce 
ecocentrism into their much celebrated education for sustainable development programs. 
The critical challenge is the seeming or actual ignorance of the academia about 
ecocentrism, or its scepticism concerning its practicality. There is therefore the urgent 
need to expose, explore and appraise the ecocentric perspective of environmental 
philosophy and thus make it accessible to the academic public as the less charted and 
more radically philosophical framework of environmental ethics. It is from that 
background that this article appraises UNEP's environmental assessment of Ogoniland in 

AN ECOCENTRIC PHILOSOPHICAL APPRAISAL OF UNEP'S 

ENVIRONMENTAL ASSESSMENT OF OGONILAND

Francis TETE

205



light of ecocentric environmental philosophy, with the objective of putting UNEP's 
anthropocentric orientation to the test of an ecocentric reassessment, thus underscoring 
the philosophical significance of ecocentrism.  

The Concept of Ecocentrism 
Ezedike captures its essence when he says that “ecocentrism puts all beings in the 
ecosystem in one moral universe” and explains this to imply that “quite apart from its 
assumed instrumental value in supporting the existence of human species, nature is 
deemed as valuable in and of itself. humans, therefore, ought to respect and demonstrate 
moral responsibility to all beings in the ecosystem” (2020, 82-83). Washington et al 
(2017) similarly maintain that ecocentrism is the broadest term for worldviews that 
recognize intrinsic value in all lifeforms and ecosystems themselves, including their 
abiotic components. Anthropocentrism, in contrast, values other lifeforms and 
ecosystems insofar as they are valuable for human well-being, preferences and interests. 
Touching on the value theory root of the concept, Keller (2019:177) opines that 
ecocentrism “is an axiology that identifies biotic communities as worthy of moral 
consideration. It is a form of holism whose ethical good is based on the health and 
flourishing of the ecological entity as a whole. In a local context, this consists of the biotic 
community, in the global context, this consists of the biosphere”. Rowe (1994) likewise 
observes that ecocentrism proposes “a value-shift from Homo sapiens to planet earth: 
Ecosphere. A scientific rationale backs the value-shift. All organisms are evolved from 
Earth, sustained by Earth. Thus Earth, not organism, is the metaphor for Life. Earth not 
humanity is the Life-center, the creativity-center. Earth is the whole of which we are 
subservient parts”.   Callicott (1999) sums it up in describing ecocentrism as a 
Copernican revolution in ethics that seeks to extend the boundaries of moral significance 
from homo sapiens to nonhuman nature.  

History of Ecocentrism 
Animism, which promoted a highly ecocentric attitude to the environment, was the 
dominant culture in early antiquity (White, 1962) and persisted almost everywhere until 
the rise of Jewish monotheism and Greek philosophy assigned the role of “conqueror” of 
the rest of the natural world. Though Hughes (1994, viii) observes that the Greeks and 
Romans had environmental problems, Hargrove (1989) contends that the general 
philosophical climate of classical antiquity made ecological thinking technically 
implausible, if not conceptually impossible (p.26). 

 Inspired jointly by Greek philosophy and the Judeo-Christian tradition, modern Western 
science was cast upon the unecological paradigm that nature has no reason to exist save to 
serve man. Inspired by Cartesian dualism and the reductionism of Newtonian physics, 
and despite Copernicus and in spite of Darwin, modern science, according to Rees (1988), 
gave impetus to a sister physics in the form of capitalist economics, which sees 'the 
environment' in terms of isolated, individual resources, whose component parts are 
bendable to human will and purpose.  The extreme anthropocentrism of this has led to 
global indifference to the disastrous ecological consequences of industrialization, while 
the gross national product (GNP) represented by bank statements is exalted as the 

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universal indicator of national health and social wellbeing.    

Though accenting to the need for a broadened value consideration for nature in the 
interest of environmental sustainability, the UN has not been consistent in conceding to 
ecocentrism. The World Charter for Nature in 1982 held that “every form of life is unique, 
warranting respect regardless of its worth to man” and demanded that I n relating to them  
“man must be guided by a moral code of action” (United Nations, 1982: preamble). In 
Our Common Future, the UN held that development “must not endanger the natural 
systems that support life on Earth: the atmosphere, the waters, the soils, and living 
beings” (WCED, 1987a: 57). The Tokyo Declaration that accompanied Our Common 
Future lost the ecocentric viewpoint again. Its Principle 1 was to “increase growth” while 
Principle 3 was to “conserve and enhance the resource base” for humans (WCED, 
1987b). In its Environmental Assessment of Ogoniland, UNEP (2011), as we shall see, the 
UN maintains a strictly anthropocentric focus, with no suggestion that the environment 
has an “intrinsic value” or “moral consideration” apart from its economic, health or 
cultural value to man. This history of ambivalent attitude towards ecocentrism 
underscores the need for academic research to look in the direction of ecocentrism, 
considering the catastrophic results of the anthropocentric orientation.

As an approach to environmental philosophy, Callicott (1999:159) explains that 
“ecocentrism sprung from Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic. Leopold aimed at advancing an 
alternative to anthropocentrism in his Sand County Almanac and his Land Ethic is a clear-
cut example of an ecocentric philosophy since it is centered on the whole ecological (or 
biotic) communities rather than their individual members. Schweitzer (1925) wrote 
Civilization and Ethics earlier but he was more biocentric in approach, emphasizing 
“reverence to life”. Taylor (1986) who wrote Respect for Nature much later got closer to 
ecocentrism. It is philosophical reactions to Leopold, however, and to Callicott (1987, 
1989, 1994, 1999, 2013) his critical advocate, that has delineated ecocentrism as a 
philosophical framework in environmental ethics.  Our task is to appraise the ecocentric 
status of UNEP's environmental assessment of Ogoniland.   

Elements of Ecocentrism 
There are certain basic elements that characterize ecocentrism irrespective of the 
diversity of authors and viewpoints that intersect to constitute its universe of 
understanding. The most fundamental of them  is holism, the outlook on the world as one 
entity of interdependent and interconnected parts. The second most critical viewpoint in 
ecocentrism is moral extensionism, the contention that nonhuman nature has a right to 
moral consideration in relation to human conduct. Another, on which the preceding 
position rather depends, is the according of intrinsic value to nature, that is, considering 
nature as having inherent worth of itself and in itself, prior to human valuation or 
usefulness to man. The other two are community metaphor and ecological conscience. 
The community concept draws on ecology and evolutionary sociobiology to assert that 
the degree of kinship between human and nonhuman nature amounts to a kind of 
community relationship which implies modes of cooperation and limitation of conduct in 
the struggle for existence. If the community metaphor is accepted then ecological 

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conscience, a kind of ecological moral sentiment, follows logically, according to 
Leopold. The last two are demands for attitudinal change and environmental education, 
both critical for the realization of the integrity of the ecological community. 

Fundamental Issues in UNEP's Assessment of Ogoniland
UNEP's environmental assessment of Ogoniland (UNEP, 2011) is the most 
comprehensive white paper on the environmental footprint of the oil industry in Africa, a 
product of scientific research conducted by competent experts with appropriate tools and 
criteria leading to credible conclusions, as opposed to politically orchestrated woe 
litanies or popular foul cries based on observable but uninvestigated environmental 
damage. Speaking for itself, the document admits of being  “the best available 
understanding of what has happened to the environment of Ogoniland—and the 
corresponding implications for affected populations”, with a promise to provide “clear 
operational guidance as to how that legacy can be addressed” (8). It is this content and 
purpose of the document that we undertake to address within the framework of ecocentric 
environmental philosophy. For this purpose, an outline of the essential elements of the 
documents' empirical findings can be made as follows: 

·Destruction of streams and rivers (surface water) through contamination with 
hydrocarbon (p.68),

·Contamination of underground water and soil due to vertical sipping of pollutants 
in areas where pollution has been unattended and or repeated for long periods 
(p.96-108ff.), 

·Destruction of mangroves (aquatic vegetation) and farmlands due to repeated and 
unattended pollution (p.72), 

·Destruction of fish and various kinds of seafood and aquatic creatures (p.178ff.)
·Destruction of air quality due to hydrocarbon sooth from gas flaring and artisanal 

refining (p.102),
·Failure of oil producing company to abide by available oil industry environmental 

regulation such as EGASIN (Environmental Guidelines and Standards for 
Petroleum Industries in Nigeria [1992]), including failure to decommission 
abandoned oil facilities (p. 43ff., 115ff, 138ff.),  

·Failure of government and oil company to safeguard pipelines and abandoned oil 
facilities from bunkering and artisanal refining, 

·Failure of SPDC's RENA (remediation by enhanced natural attenuation) 
procedure to achieve either environmental clean-up or legislative compliance (p. 
144 ff.)

·Recommendation of clean up as joint restitution by government and oil company 
(p. 207 ff.)

·Recommendation of environmental education in the form of awareness campaign 
(p.215)    

It is these contents of  UNEP's assessment that we shall now appraise in light of key 
concepts of ecocentric environmental philosophy.

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The UNEP Assessment and the Community Concept 
As a prime concept of the ecocentric perspective the community concept constitutes a 
foremost challenge to the UNEP environmental assessment of Ogoniland. In this regard it 
is observable that the UNEP assessment does not indicate any concept of “community” 
that binds the streams and rivers and mangroves and tilapia and cockles together with the 
human inhabitants of the land and drillers and refiners of oil as unavoidably bound 
together as one whole. UNEP did not observe any breach of community relationship 
between the human actors on the land and the nonhuman members of the land community. 
The analysis did not observe the logical contradiction in the action of the people who took 
part in bunkery and artisanal refining that laced the creeks with layers of hydrocarbons 
and decimated the aquatic populations decisively yet used monies sold from the oil 
business to search in vain for fish they could buy for consumption. The same can be said 
of Shell's ravenous oil exploitation activities. UNEP did not observe that the oil company 
acted from a perspective of one who did not see himself as belong to a “community” with 
the land on which oil was struck. In Leopold's language, Shell acted with the mindset of 
modern homo sapiens, the conqueror of the land community. From this conqueror 
perspective oil business could thus be done without regard for the land and other members 
of the land community. The violation and reckless destruction of fauna and flora with no 
honest commitment to restoration is symptomatic of a pre-ecological understanding of 
the Earth as given to man to plunder and conquer as his strength can afford.  

UNEP Assessment and Intrinsic Value    
Closely related to the absence of a community understanding in the human treatment of 
land is the failure to regard every member of the environment as having value in 
themselves, irrespective of their instrumental value to mankind. This is poignantly 
missing in UNEP's assessment. The assessment failed to observe that an instrumental 
axiology of the ecological community by the human members who do not see themselves 
as members stand at the baseline of the ecological disaster that both multinational oil 
business and local refining turned Ogoniland into. Even UNEP's judgment of misconduct 
on the part of these local and international actors only considered the instrumental value 
of the destroyed “resources”.  There was no definite reference to a loss of ecological value 
or other forms of inherent worth attributable to the various nonhuman victims of the 
environmental damage. UNEP programmed its assessment on the ecologically fallacious 
premise consistently disparaged by Leopold, namely, the supposition that evidence of 
wrongdoing “had to be economic in order to be valid”. It appears by UNEP's assessment 
that the destruction of mangrove vegetation and farmlands and creeks alongside the 
massive extermination of periwinkle, tilapia, catfish, crayfish, mallet, sardines, bonga 
fish, oysters, cockles, mussels, and various kinds of crabs in the ogoni rivers was wrong 
only because of the economic and human cultural value of the species involved. There 
were surely thousands of other species of non-economically valuable and perhaps 
culturally unpopular species destroyed as a result of the massive pollution of land, stream 
and creek which the UNEP report apparently did not bother to assess or report about.  
  
In Rolston's analysis, the perpetrators of the environmental damage would have had a 
sense of duty towards the natural world if they had an appropriate judgment of the values 

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resident in the natural world quite apart of their usefulness to human purposes. Among 
such cognitive, critical and moral duties of humans to the natural world missed out in the 
UNEP assessment is what Rolston captures as the duty of “transcending human interests 
and linking them up with those of the whole natural Earth” (1988, 72). In Rolston's view it 
is such duties as this owed by humans towards the natural world are part of the reasons 
human superiority to nonhuman nature isn't “groundless prejudice”. In Leopold's land 
ethic perspective even the members of the ecological community who have no direct 
human utility value have critical ecological value to the extent they contribute to the 
integrity, stability and beauty of the ecosystem. And, again, for Leopold, every member of 
the ecosystem should have been a subject of UNEP's value judgment for the sake of the 
ecological whole of which it is a part, if not for its own sake. From the angle of Taylor's 
biological egalitarian framework, UNEP assessed the damage done to the Ogoni 
ecosystems on the same ecologically ignorant and logically fallacious (it involves a 
petitio principii) consideration that humans are the superior species, that nonhuman 
species have no inherent worth, and that usefulness to human species is the standard for 
determining what treatment other species deserve. 

UNEP's Assessment and Ecological Conscience 
Another point on which an ecocentric review of environmental destruction of Ogoniland 
would dwell relates to the concept of ecological conscience. The UNEP assessment could 
not see this because it viewed the disaster with the short-sighted lenses of 
anthropocentrism. An ecocentric binoculars would go further to see that an absence of 
ecological moral sentiment on the part of the human members of the ecological 
community stood at the backdrop of the senseless treatment of the environment 
fundamentally. Despite variations in the conception of conscience across the continuum 
of philosophy's history, Leopold's notion of ecological conscience as part of the 
evolutionary possibility of a land ethic is not philosophically unthinkable. The 
scholastics, most ably represented by Thomas Aquinas, saw conscience as the act of 
applying universal principles (i.e., divine laws) to real situations (Aquinas, Summa 
Theologiae, 1 q79; Langston 2000 and 2015; Sorabji 2014: 62–66). Ecologically this 
implies that the created order makes certain moral demands on human conduct in real life 
situations even in relation to the natural environment. As Schaffer (2009) has argued, the 
sentiments of the Christian saints and other provisions of patristic and medieval 
hagiography are capable of alignment with the facts and theories of evolutionary, 
molecular, and ethological biology to suggest a behaviour pattern demanding more 
responsible attitudes and actions toward other species (p.149). in modern times Rousseau 
defines conscience as “an innate principle of justice and virtue, by which …we judge our 
own actions or those of others to be good or evil (Rousseau 1921 [1762]: 253). This too is 
applicable to Leopold's idea that humanity activate our ecological conscience. Callicott 
has been emphatic in relating Leopold's ecological conscience to the “moral sentiment” 

th
theory of 18  Century sentimentalist philosophers, especially David Hume. In Kant, 
“every human being, as a moral being, has a conscience within him originally” (Kant 
1797 [1991]: 160), and conscience is one of the four “natural predispositions of the mind 
(…) for being affected by concepts of duty”, the other three being moral feeling, love for 
one's neighbours, and respect for oneself (Kant 1797 [1991]: 160). This too does not 

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contradict the prospect of an ecological imperative as a matter of conscience, a judgment 
of the mind, to act dutifully towards nature in certain acceptable ways and to refrain from 
acting in certain unacceptable ways. In Leopold's analysis, the lack of community 
understanding and absence of moral sentiment between human actors in the Ogoni 
environmental odyssey and the ecological victims translated to the lack of care and sense 
of duty to respect and protect the natural environment. 

UNEP's Assessment and Moral Extensionism 
An ecocentric appraisal of UNEP's assessment further considers the extent of moral 
extensionism in the assessment. The only apparent submission to moral extensionism in 
the assessment is the demand for clean up of the degraded environment by a collaboration 
of those who principally colluded to wreck the havoc in the first instance, the Federal 
Government and the Shell Petroleum Development Company. However, the assessment 
makes no proscription or approbation on the basis of any conception of right and wrong in 
human relation to nature. Even the demand for clean up as an ethical responsibility does 
not appear to be made in respect of the respect and care which the environment deserves in 
its own right in repair for the heinous disruption of its integrity, stability and beauty, but 
rather as restitution to the human community whose “resource” base for subsistent 
farming and fishing had been vandalized. In other words, the demand for clean up made 
by UNEP in favor of the Ogoni environment qualifies as call for moral responsibility only 
on the anthropocentric level, and does not meet the requirement of moral extensionism 
characteristic of ecocentrism. 

Despite divergence of opinions among environmental philosophers regarding what the 
trademarks of moral consideration should be, the failure of the UNEP assessment to 
consider the various nonhuman victims of the Ogoni ecological disaster as deserving 
moral standing on their own worth leaves the assessment light-footed as a work of 
environmental ethics. Maintaining the classical human chauvinism of traditional ethics, 
the UNEP assessment fails, in the language of Richard and Val Routley, to consider a 
“removal of humans from a dominant position in the natural order” (1980, 96). The UNEP 
document leaves its reader with the classical impression that humans are free to do as they 
wish with the environment insofar as they do not cause damage to their human usefulness. 
Here Leopold would disparage the UNEP assessment for failure to evince an extension of 
ethics from people to land. Taylor would refute UNEP for failure to admit respect for 
nature into for its value into its assessment. Schweitzer would criticize the UNEP 
environmental assessment for failing to make ethical judgments regarding the 
mistreatment of various “will-to-live” in the Ogoni environmental carnage and would 
roundly reject the document's inability to call for an “extended responsibility with regard 
to everything that has life”(in Pojman, p.96). 

UNEP's Assessment and Attitudinal Change 
Having failed in the previous aspects of ecocentrism considered in the foregoing, the 
UNEP project also failed in what should be their consequent, namely the ecocentric 
demand for attitudinal change. Ecological ethics, in Leopold's connotation, being 
fundamentally about “a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence” and 

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a “tendency of interdependent individuals or groups to evolve modes of cooperation”, the 
crux of any environmental assessment would assess current modes of conduct and 
prescribe appropriate change of behaviour. For the Land Ethic Leopold prescribed a 
change of conduct on the part of homo sapiens from the role of the conqueror of the land 
community to a plain member and citizen of the community. The UNEP assessment 
prescribed certain changes of behaviour but not in respect of the nonhuman members of 
the ecological community. The prescriptions of the UNEP document does not extend to 
the realm of human obligations towards nonhuman nature. The assessment does not call 
for respect for life and care for nature for their intrinsic biodiversity value. Naess would 
appraise the UNEP (2011, 138-151) assessment as having a shallow environmental 
approach, focusing almost exclusively on technical aspects of environmental protection, 
including, important as they are, noncompliance with the legal provisions of EGASPIN 
(Environmental Guidelines and Standards for Petroleum Industries in Nigeria [1992]) 
and ineffectual reliance by SPDC on RENA (Remediation by enhanced natural 
attenuation), thereby tending to “make the public more passive and disinterested in the 
more crucial non-technical lifestyle-related, environmental issues (in Zimmerman et al, 
1993, 204). The UNEP document does not highlight in its recommendations the central 
challenge of attitudinal shift of environmental ethics; what Leopold dubbed “a little 
healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings”; what Naess calls “simple living”, 
“appreciating life quality, …rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of 
living”.  Pope Francis emphasizes this attitudinal change in his critique of the throwaway 
culture, that turns the earth into a pile of filth with accumulated rubbish from homes and 
businesses, construction and demolition sites, clinical, electronic and industrial sources, 
most of them non-biodegradable, highly toxic and radioactive (LS, 21). Quoting Pope 
John Paul II, Francis would leave UNEP's assessment with a m issing keynote on 
attitudinal change: “Every effort to protect and imp rove our world entails profound 
changes in “lifestyles, models of production and consumption, and the established 
structures of power which today govern societies” (LS, 5; CA, 58).

UNEP's Assessment and Environmental Education  
Considering the role of ignorance in our deepening environmental crisis (Leopold, 234-
235; Tuttle, 2012), the final challenge of ecocentrism, or any environmental ethic 
whatsoever, is environmental education. This has been a critical dimension of 
ecocentrism. Significantly, however, UNEP's only reference to environmental education 
is an embarrassing half a sentence on the need for “awareness campaign” for local 
participants in bunkering and artisanal refining (2011, 215). Even so, UNEP's proposal 
for environmental education stops at informal education, with is its susceptibility to 
unpredictability of definitive results and other limitations. In this UNEP appears to 
underestimate the role of education in checkmating the tide of environmental 
degradation. Then the recommended education leaves out the prime destroyers of the 
environment, the multinational oil companies and their staff and those undergoing formal 
education who shall take up leadership positions as government functionaries, 
institutional administrators and policy makers. Eventually the environmental education 
recommended is unabashedly simplistic and hopelessly human-centred, with emphasis 
only on “the disproportionate nature of the short-term financial gain set against the 

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medium to long-term health consequences” (215). In this the UNEP document fails in its 
rendition at the crescendo. 

EVALUATION AND CONCLUSION 
The ecological disaster to which multinational oil business turned Ogoniland as 
evidenced in UNEP's assessment corroborates Leopold's repeated insistence that the 
conqueror (anthropocentric) relation of homo sapiens (humankind) to the environment 
(biotic community) to which he is merely a native, a plain member and citizen, is self-
defeatist and calls for a new ethic of appropriate respect and care for the environment. The 
UNEP assessment demonstrates by implication the failure of classical philosophical 
ethics in its anthropocentric orientation to meet the global needs of environmental 
protection is evidenced in the catastrophic prospects of a looming environmental 
apocalypse due to global warming and climate change, resource depletion and 
desertification, ecosystem destruction and biodiversity loss, and global environmental 
pollution. The weaknesses of UNEP's assessment shows, as Wehrden et al (2016, 68) 
have argued, the urgency of research that aim at “harmonizing people and nature” (that is, 
that are ecocentric), and their “primary importance for achieving a sustainable future … 
especially but not exclusively if they aid normative and transformative knowledge 
creation”.

Although ecocentrism was once thought to be theoretically groundless (Passmore 1974, 
Artfield 1992), its philosophical integrity has been robustly defended (Callicott 1987, 
1999; Ress, 1988) and extensively expanded (Naess 1974, Rolston 1988). The 
converging postulation of ecocentric thinkers thus captured in the above critique of 
UNEP's environmental assessment of Ogoniland is that current threats to environmental 
sustainability cannot be checkmated by merely prudential anthropocentric prescriptions. 
A shift from anthropocentric to ecocentric models of human relation to nonhuman nature 
thus appears as a new Copernican revolution in ethics to which the UNEP assessment is 
diametrically disconnected. The inadequacy of anthropocentrism as an ethical 
framework for environmental protection implies the need for a new philosophical 
framework, just as the failure of geocentrism naturally called for a paradigm shift to 
heliocentrism as a logical necessity for scientific and civilizational progress (Kuhn, 
Popper). In view of progress in environmental protection we conclude with the 
recommendation that ecological ethics be emphasized in environmental education to 
broaden the axiological framework of environmental ethics accessible in academia and to 
government and private policy makers. 

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