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IB DP ESS — Topic 1: Foundations | SL & HL | Paper 1 & Paper 2
🎯 Learning Intentions By the end of this note, you will be able to:
- Define the terms worldview, environmental value system, ecocentrism, anthropocentrism, and technocentrism using IB-aligned ESS terminology.
- Explain how different environmental value systems shape attitudes toward nature, resource use, and environmental decision-making.
- Distinguish between ecocentric, anthropocentric, and technocentric worldviews, identifying their key assumptions and implications for environmental management.
- Describe how personal, cultural, and societal worldviews influence responses to environmental issues at local, national, and global scales.
- Analyse real-world environmental conflicts and policy decisions through the lens of contrasting value systems, applying ESS analysis parameters including perspectives, sustainability, and trade-offs.
- Evaluate the strengths and limitations of each worldview in addressing contemporary environmental challenges such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and resource depletion.
- Discuss how indigenous and non-Western worldviews contribute to environmental understanding and management, and why pluralism in environmental thinking matters.
Real-World Context & Relevance
In 2016, New Zealand's Whanganui River became the first river in the world to be granted legal personhood — the same rights as a human being. This decision emerged from decades of advocacy by the Māori people, for whom the river is an ancestor: Ko au te awa, ko te awa ko au — "I am the river, the river is me." The legal recognition was not just a policy; it was the formal acknowledgement that a fundamentally different way of understanding the relationship between humans and nature had value in law and governance. For the Māori, the river was not a resource to be managed but a living entity to be respected.
Contrast this with the construction of the Three Gorges Dam in China, completed in 2006, which displaced 1.3 million people and submerged over 1,000 archaeological sites in the pursuit of hydroelectric power generation. Proponents argued that the dam would reduce coal dependency and provide clean energy for hundreds of millions of people — a technocentric calculation in which technology and innovation could solve both energy and environmental problems simultaneously. Critics, including environmental groups and displaced communities, argued that the ecological and cultural costs were irreversible and that the river's intrinsic value had been ignored entirely. These two cases — a river granted rights, and a river dammed for power — illustrate a fundamental tension at the heart of all environmental decision-making: what do we believe nature is for , and what obligations do we have toward it?
💡 Why This Matters Every environmental policy, every conservation decision, and every resource management plan is shaped — consciously or not — by the worldview of the people making it - a paradigm. Understanding environmental value systems is not abstract philosophy; it is the foundation for understanding why environmental problems persist, why solutions are contested, and how different societies approach sustainability. In ESS, worldviews underpin every topic from biodiversity to climate change to food systems.
Core Concepts & Definitions
Before we can analyse why people disagree about environmental issues, we need to understand what shapes those disagreements at the deepest level. People do