Současná ekologická krize a riziko zespolečenštění přírody

The contemporary global environmental change can be sociologicaly understood in connection with the risk, that occurs within the processes of socialization (i.e. material and symbolic appropriation) of nature by humans. This metaphor can be identified in terms of the relationships between society and natural environment as distinctively modern social, cultural construction based on the scientific image of nature with its dominant techno-economic and cultural symbolic levels. The risks of ecological crisis today bring the questions of power and responsibility for the aims, directions and consequences of the scientific and technological development. This also leads to the questioning and revision of the very idea of social progress. The responsibility for the knowledge operationalization in modern societies is delegated to anonymous decision-making processes. The risk produced in the framework of quasi-autonomous segments of the enterprise, research and development are supra-individual, collective, social. They are mostly institutionally uncontrolled (and in this sense externalized) and producing controversial adaptive reactions by social actors. Under such circumstances it is impossible, therefore, to separate any more the technological and moral aspects within the modern concept of „progress“. The claims of responsibility to avoid growing environmental threats and risk appeal for a renewed moral growth within social evolution and development in terms of sustainable development and co-evolution in harmony with the nature, not against nature.