One of the most important processes taking place in the framework of present philosophical thinking is an effort to accept the relation between the human being and the environment and to recognize the value of such structures. This value had been absent in ethical systems heretofore or at least had been unattended to so that it had not been articulated in specific ethic norms. In the past decade environmental ethics has attempted to outline, elaborate and justify such norms and, to some extent, to make them function.

In that period, an environmental ethics has become a recognized trend in philosophical reflection. It is characterized by a concrete, specific method of considering reality and focuses on ethical relations among people and the surrounding environment taken in the broadest sense of the word, i.e., the world of nature, ecosystems and the planet Earth. It consists in the process of discovering the ethical character of the relations between people and their natural environment, and especially the corresponding reorientation of social values. This article will focus only on the process of social changes regarding environmental needs and will propose and develop methods that can be applied in this framework. In the process of democratization a group called "Nature and Union Landscape Protectors" has been influential in drawing attention to these concerns, and their formulation of the issue will be taken as a starting point.

In democratic societies during the past decades much attention has been devoted to investigating the possibilities of harmonizing the relations of human beings to the environment and to specifying what this means in terms of responsibility and duty towards the natural environment. In this endeavor, the search for socially acceptable norms of behaviour towards nature as an environment for humans as well as for plants and animals was one of the most difficult and problematic tasks.

The process was not only one of searching out the various dimensions of an organic relation between the environment and human beings. In democratic societies it was also a matter of finding its expression and support or acceptance by democratic principles, and creating adequate (even specific) space for this. This process included many projects, scientific works, drafts and proposals, all with a number of variations. The plurality of opinions meant among other things a broad research forum for investigating the reasons for the state of affairs, as well as possibilities for modifying the related value orientations on the individual and social level. The axiological and ethical conceptions were created gradually and shaped through discussion. This process took more than three decades.

Historically, this process of accepting environmental values meant also reorienting social values to take them into account on two levels: the theoretical-ethical and the practical-ethical (after which come the legal and the legislative). The first should logically precede the second, but this is not necessarily valid in certain revolutionary situations and processes in a time of fundamental transformations in social, property and legal relations. This is especially so as access to the related philosophical work previously have been limited or even artificially prevented by a totalitarian regime during that period.

The process of social transformation to a democratic society supposed a change in the outlook on human behaviour with regard to the oikos from the moral point of view. However, the absence of a theoretical-scientific basis for an environmental ethics, the lack of clarity regarding the principles of an environmental market economy or "green" economy on which to base the elaboration of a complete politico-economic response, played a negative role in the form of the lack of a theoretical interpretational framework for ecological morals. The total or partial absence of theoretical solutions for the problems had practical consequences in slowing the elaboration of concrete plans for reform and the development of practical environmental ethics and green politics.

In this situation the search for answers to questions of whether there should be an ethical norm of ecological morals, what are the criteria of environmental behaviour and why they should be constituted in this way rather than another has only begun. However, without clear theoretical ideas, this task is not only problematic, but almost unsolvable. To overcome the problems requires becoming familiar with the main ideas and accomplishments which over the past three decades have called attention to the existence and character of the global problems. This is the philosophical starting-point for changes in the world.

Much has changed: the possibilities and conditions, the starting principles, most of the factors about which this specific type of reflection began, and the forms and methods of disseminating environmental ideas. Because this began in 1989, many of these conceptions which had concerned Western European and American thinkers during the 70s and 80s — for example the conception of the zero growth by Meadows, the critique of Christian anthropocentrism and the ensuring discussion — did not have so significant an influence on the environmental reflection in our country. But, given that there is an inevitable sequence in the development of structures and therefore difficulty in speeding up individual steps, a certain delay especially in the field of practical environmental ethics and its influence on professional ethics was to be expected.

However, the specifics of development implied the need to search out alternatives for solving the economic problems in the transformation, i.e. to become oriented among the economic-environmental conceptions of Permanently Sustainable Development and the Permanently Sustainable Life. More intuitively than consciously, and even before the revolution and the constitution of the Green Party, Permanently Sustainable Development was given priority, based on securing the needs of present humanity without limiting future generations from satisfying theirs.

Only in the year 1994 did a group oriented toward ecocentrism and deep ecology separate out theoretically with the conception of Permanently Sustainable Life, the need to harmonize relations in nature with human beings as an organic part of nature. For this group, built around M. Huba (a founder of the Society for Permanently Maintainable Life in Slovakia), it is optimal not to interfere with nature at all. Such a narrow environmental attitude has a certain passivity due to the belief that it is possible to solve environmental problems by changing previous attitudes in terms of Fromm’s distinction between to have, and ‘to be’. In this view the ethical environmental norm is a compass to which one should adhere. This focuses on the individual’s axiological and ethical attitude, which can be formed on sensitivity in one’s contact with nature and further self-education.

However, the ethical norm of ecological morals must have some form if it is to begin to be asserted and to function in the framework of a practical and professional ethics (a business and managerial ethics, etc.) and to reflect real social values. Perhaps because in environmental ethics a number of trends exists, which extend ethical relations to other animal species as well (by P. Singer, T. Regan and others), or which extend the ethical process to the whole — ecosystems, biotic communities, or the planet (A. Leopold, J.B. Callicott, J.E. Lovelock and others) — it is necessary to keep in mind the fact that in the community there are different ideas about the values involved in environmental problems. Only part of them can acquire the function of moral normative rules that can be used to create some hypostased, utilitarian idea of ecological security (the legal term) for a society as a whole. The ideas, which acquire a normative form only problematically or not at all, remain on the level of axiological individualism, so their acceptance depends on the choice and possibilities of individuals. However, it is illusory to think that in an axiological individualism everybody will realize their own responsibility and adhere to their opinion or that this will be the same or at least similar to opinions of other individuals in a society. Moral assessments are not only about the values of aims, for if agreement about concrete aims would provide the basis of moral opinions, moral rules, as we know them, would not be needed ([4], 154). It is moral norms and therefore moral rules that classify certain sorts of action.

To start thinking about the conception of a balanced, sustainable economy (steady-state economy) ([2], 93 and following), based on the requirements of constant population and artifacts, optimal range of both and as low a throughput of substances and energy as possible, appears illusory in a period of economic transformation, in which many ethical market principles are absent. In spite of that, if we take into consideration all the standpoints and approaches now present in the environmentally concerned part of our society, we conclude that Daly’s idea of maintaining balance in the economy represents a certain ideal, which all authors are concerned to reach though they choose different methods and means. The most pragmatic is the economic-environmental approach by B. Moldan [8]. There is social interest in the cultural-historical-value approach of J. Vavrousek [12] built on the need to return to traditional values, that (with the exception of the last forty years) had existed in this field and had been functional and functioning. The environmental approach by M. Huba [5] speaks to those perceiving a range of individual environmental responsibilities. The sociological-economical analysis of J. Keller about the social roots of the ecological crisis [6] is a significant contribution. The opinion gradually asserting itself is that waiting for the process of change to be completed and for enough resources for ecological projects (V. Klaus) in order to begin implanting green economic principles into democratic structures is not only undesirable and not well-founded, but from the point of view of forming a civil society in developing economies is not significant and is indeed short-sighted (see [13], 8-34). On the contrary, it is necessary to work as intensively as possible in order not to experience the bitter after-taste of having tried hard to reach an aim which was abandoned by the developed world, at the very time we were starting on the way towards it ([9], 5). The warranty for environmental security in democratic societies is created gradually and naturally as a part of both citizen and human rights. It is assumed to grow constantly. If the state cannot assure it sufficiently for the future, then movements for clean water, clean air and hygienic foodstuffs become the most important social advances for the future century.

1. In the framework of organization No. 6 in Bratislava, cooperation on projects began in 1982, that resulted in the internal publications Bratislava/Loudly and Slovakia/Loudly, directed to protectors, enthusiasts and activists with the goal of changing the politics of protection. See: After-November Slovakia I-II (Bratislava, 1994), p. 3.

2. The first survey of public thinking after November, 1989 signaled that more than 50 percent of Slovak inhabitants considered solving environmental problems to be a priority. See: After-November Slovakia III, investigation "Environment as a Value", pp. 82 and 93.

3. Mikulát Huba mentions that the revolutionary VPN was born of concerns with the human, management and material-technical basis of the environmental protection movement. M. Huba, "About a Chance to Reorient Slovakia onto the Way of Permanent Sustainability". In: After-November Slovakia I-II (Bratislava, 1994), p. 8. Many initiators of Bratislava/Loudly began to participate in constituting the Party of Greens, to search for a political expression of the protection idea. The ethical dimension of the problems practically supplanted the political. Establishment of the second part created a functional non-governmental organization of Green Peace and Sloboda zvierat (Peace of Animals) which dealt with certain concrete projects.

4. Doubts regarding this work ensue from the fact that these mechanisms were formed in the situation in which legislation securing a certain level of ecological responsibility practically did not exist and the operative supposition was: What is not explicitly prohibited is allowed.

5. In the first post-revolutionary period it was not possible unambiguously to determine the representatives of the individual political trends OF and VPN, because these movements had not yet clarified their identity and so were fused to some extent. However, the protectors and the Greens were the initiators of democratization in the process of the transformation though at the beginning their influence was not so significant.

6. It is obvious that the situation was conditioned by may events among which the absence of a theoretical basis for environmental ethics was but one. There were also problems of civil society, of morality and of legality. As another example besides those mentioned is the influence of nationalistic ideas as well (at the time of the so-called conflicts about competencies in the CSFR in 1991 and 1992), when a section of the Party of Greens was separated and a Party of Greens in Slovakia declared itself.

7. Of course, there still exists an ideological declarative approach, in which an hypostased idea is given a social value, as for example the value of labour in the socialist regime.