MORAL REALISM?

Vice President Cheney famously characterized conservation as little more than an empty insignificant gesture. Sir David Attenborough differs:

Attenborough urges 'moral change'
13 December 2006 (BBC News)

- "What we can do is make the situation deteriorate less than it's going to."
Sir David said "a general moral view" that wasting energy was wrong - such as there had been over wasting food during the Second World War - was needed…
- Sir David, whose series include Life on Earth, The Blue Planet and Planet Earth, said: "I'm hopeful that there's a real change taking place in moral attitudes that it's not to do with saving pennies here and there but it's morally wrong to waste energy because we are putting at risk our grandchildren…People do look at 4x4s in central London and curl a lip already."
- Sir David also told [the House of Comons environmental committee]: "I grew up during the war and during the war it was a common view that wasting anything was wrong…It wasn't that we thought we were going to defeat Hitler by eating a lot of gristle in our meat but it was actually wrong not to eat our food."
- There needed to be a similar "general moral view that wasting energy is wrong", Sir David added…
- Sir David told MPs he had had doubts about climate change until attending a lecture by a US expert which proved that recent climate change was man-made, rather than part of the cycle of nature…