During the first half of the nineteenth century, courts in the United States tended to refer frequently in their rulings to foundational legal principles. The principles were not binding precedent as such. Instead they were useful, shorthand ways to highlight core elements that structured the law and guided its application. Two principles, both phrased in Latin, were commonly employed in land-use disputes and when landowners claimed that land-use regulations violated their rights. One principle, the preeminent one according to legal historian William Novak, was solus populi supreme lex est: the health or welfare of the people is the supreme law. The second was more focused, sic utere tuo ut alienum non lædas: so use your own (property) as not to injure another’s (property). The latter principle was, of course, a variant on the idea that figured prominently in the liberal thought of John Locke and John Stuart Mill: an individual should enjoy liberty so long as no harm resulted. It was a vague and thus flexible principle, one that could be applied according to local circumstances and prevailing sentiment.
Courts used this language when responding to claims that landowner rights were being impaired. Sometimes property owners won such cases, often they did not. Property rights were highly regarded at the time; that was not in doubt. But individual rights existed in a larger legal and moral framework. As perhaps the era’s leading state court justice explained, individual rights needed to be weighed along with the similar rights of the local community. Justice Lemuel Shaw put it this way:
We think it is a settled principle, growing out of the nature of well-ordered civil society, that every holder of property . . . holds it under the implied liability that his use of it may be so regulated, that it should not be injurious to the equal enjoyment of others having an equal right to the enjoyment of their property, nor injurious to the rights of the community. All property in this commonwealth . . . is derived directly or indirectly from the government, and held subject to those general regulations, which are necessary to the common good and general welfare.1
Shaw’s framework was employed earlier in a ruling by the US Supreme Court by Chief Justice Roger Taney. The dispute involved the alleged sanctity of a charter that granted a monopoly to a company operating a toll bridge across the Charles River near Boston. The importance of private property was not in doubt, but again such rights were subordinate to the larger public welfare:
While the rights of private property are sacredly guarded, we must not forget that the community also have rights, and that the happiness and well being of every citizen depends on their faithful preservation.2
Over the course of the nineteenth century language of this type appeared less and less frequently in court opinions. The salus populi principle in particular fell rapidly from favor and rarely appeared in rulings by the century’s end. Courts similarly found fewer occasions to refer to rights possessed by communities as such. Indeed, as the twentieth century began rights were things that almost by definition attached only to individuals or other legal persons. The sic utere tuo principle continued to enjoy favor but its application shifted in response to the nation’s industrialization and urbanization. Literally applied, the do-no-harm principle could bring a halt to intensive activities that generated economic benefits but did so by imposing costs on surrounding owners. Do-no-harm tended to favor the first landowner in a region, often a farmer, given that the land-use conflict only arose when a later land user arrived and began operations. The later actor was the source of the conflict, courts originally said.
Over the decades courts paid less attention to sic utere tuo as a general principle. Instead they focused on the specific legal rules being applied, typically causes of action in public and private nuisance. Under them, an individual owner or a community harmed by an intensive new land use could halt the damaging use only if it amounted to a legal nuisance. With a bit of tweaking courts revised nuisance law so that it only protected against substantial harms, not harms that were modest. And increasingly they expressly reminded readers that defendant land users also had rights themselves, rights, they now said, to use their lands freely so long as they acted in ordinary and reasonable ways. If they did so, if their activities were similar to the land uses of other industrial-age landowners, then the owners were not engaged in nuisances. The resulting harms were therefore permissible and the neighbors harmed simply had to suffer the consequences. Do-no-harm, that is, became more of a specific rule of law and it came to mean, not avoid all harm or even all appreciable harm, but instead avoid causing substantial harm under circumstances that were deemed unreasonable under the era’s pro-growth sentiment.
The trend taking place, we can easily see, was a trend to allow more intensive land uses, industrial and urban mostly. Necessarily that meant lessened legal protections for the quiet users of land who were being disrupted by their new noisy or polluting neighbors. It also involved a greater focus on the individual rather than on the community. Public nuisance law still existed and it still served to protect public health and safety. But it too increasingly was a specific body of law that existed side by side with other bodies of law. Except in specific settings private citizens faced real hurdles in challenging a land use as a public, rather than private, nuisance. It was the job of civil authorities to bring such legal actions, courts increasingly said, and if civic authorities preferred to side with the new industrial landowners (as they often did), then no public nuisance action would be brought and the harm-causing activity could continue.
What was fading in this pro-industrial shift in property law was the broader venerable notion that the public welfare was not just important but supreme. Disappearing too was the idea that communities as such had legal rights, or even that they existed in the law except as incorporated entities. In moral terms, the individual was ascending in primacy, in law just as it was in the moral philosophy of Kantian deontological thinkers and utilitarians. Rights-based thinking would gain further ground in American law over the ensuing decades. Individuals held rights as autonomous beings, it was stressed more often, rights that were detached from social settings. In the eyes of the law individuals were not embedded, not overtly at least, in a shared moral order that valued and upheld the welfare of communities as such.
In its various guises this individualistic perspective, in land-use law and public morality, is essentially where we find ourselves today. The moral order is made up of rights-bearing individual humans. They carry their rights with them wherever they go. Where they live is of no moral consequence, nor is their communal embeddedness. Social communities as such have faded in moral and legal importance. Natural communities as such never carried much weight (though valuable parts of them certainly have). The moral focus is on the present, largely ignoring future generations. Other life forms gain value only as private property, and it is value chiefly measured, in the law at least, by market processes. Government’s main role is to keep public order so that individuals can go about exercising their rights as they see fit.
In this present-day, individual-centered cultural view, the various goods that people might desire are quite often thought of as marketplace commodities, things that people might buy and consume as individuals and families. Those who want a particular good or service can turn to the market for it. A good school for children is something parents with money can buy. A safe neighborhood, one with parks and sidewalks and public services, is also for sale to those who can afford to move into it. For those who want such goods the dominant message is abundantly clear: earn money and then go into the market to the buy the goods.
How this reasoning applies in the environmental arena is explored in an insightful and disturbing study by Andrew Szasz, Shopping Our Way to Safety: How We Changed from Protecting the Environment to Protecting Ourselves. For people of middle-class means and higher, Szasz states, the tendency has been to improve their environmental surroundings by turning to the market. Instead of working with fellow citizens to promote the common good, those with money are sometimes prone simply to distance themselves from environmental dangers. They move away from air pollution and toxic risks. They install filters on their water systems and shift to bottled water. They shop in organic food stores. In short, they cut themselves off from environmental dangers rather than standing to fight them. Indeed, many show hostility toward regulations that protect the environment or that promote healthier food systems. Such regulations, critics contend (often wrongly), hamper the economic machine that generates their individual income. Regulation also can overstep government’s proper, neutral role while limiting individual liberty.
Szasz has termed this the reverse-quarantine approach. People with money construct healthy enclaves and healthy supply chains in a landscape that is then allowed to slide down. Manufacturing, mining, and energy generation are sent far away, overseas if possible, soon followed by the inevitable high-consumption return wastes. When living within a healthy enclave it becomes easy to ignore the plight of miners, factory workers, and those who live on or near the resulting wastes. It is easy to overlook the low-wage workers in impoverished places paid to dissemble discarded electronics and scavenge reusable materials. Indeed, in the market-age worldview, a person is only responsible for his own actions, not for the actions of contracting parties. A consumer is not responsible for the ills associated with making goods or generating power, nor is he responsible for how his wastes are handled so long as he pays someone to haul them away. In sum, Szasz reports, a clean environment for many has simply become another market commodity allocated according to price, another benefit available for those with money to spend. The good-citizen way to deal with deterioration is to fight it; the smart-consumer way is to buy your way out.
Environmental problems arise because we misuse nature. Our actions are shaped by available technology and other material factors. Human population also plays a vital role. Yet we act toward nature as we do in critical part due to cultural and cognitive factors, chiefly those considered in the previous chapters. Our conduct reflects how we see the world and understand our place in it. It is guided by the moral frameworks in which we live, by our short time horizons, and by our sense of being, in essence, rights-bearing autonomous individuals. The primacy we attach to individual liberty and equality, as noted, plays a critical role. Our long escape from the strictures of communal duties also fits in prominently. Our daily lives are centered on the market and we define ourselves, as others often see us, predominantly by our roles as producers (job-holders) and consumers. Within the public realm, talk and action are constrained by an insistence on objectivity, leading to overuses of science and scientific methodologies. Nature is fragmented into private parcels and commodities; it is mere physical stuff, controlled by owners and valued by market processes. Social and natural communities have no particular value as such. And other life forms gain value, if at all, only by their immediate and obvious contributions to human welfare.
Looking around the world, it is clear that we are collectively still guided by a ceaseless urge to dominate nature, to harvest it and improve it, as if nature’s ways contained no embedded wisdom. Using the language of reason and often believing what we say, we have been clever in denying even the plain testimony of our senses, clever in claiming that obvious degradation is somehow a good thing, clever in claiming that vice is somehow virtue. In the United States, all of this is worsened by a still-lingering sense that nature’s resources are essentially unlimited, if we just work hard enough to find them. American culture was forged in a colonial-era setting in which nature seemed abundant if not limitless, in which there were always fresh lands over the horizon. Abundance gave rise to a cultural tendency to consume, degrade, and move on, a tendency, now market-driven, that remains distinctly evident even as we recognize that the factual truths are otherwise.
The vast bulk of environmental-related research taking place in universities and research centers today, at considerable public expense, is scientific and technical. The science part is undertaken, like all other science, to generate new factual knowledge. The technical and engineering part aims to generate new, greener technologies. Implicit in this work is an assumption that our environmental ills are either caused by a shortage of facts and good technology or will be solved with more facts and better technology. Yet we do not remotely make use of the information and technology that we already possess, and there are reasons to doubt that more facts and better technology will bring much change. Facts and technology bring gains only when they are put to use. In the case of most environmental problems, we already know enough to bring about sizeable improvements using technology in hand. And yet much technology sits on the shelf. We regularly miss chances to apply what we know.
It is telling that university environmental programs are almost always run by scientists and are largely staffed by scientists, typically scientists who study nature. The implication is that our problems reside in nature or that solutions will be found in nature. But our problems are not there. Our problems are in and among people. Human behavior is the cause. Behavioral change is the solution. Bad behavior can stem from ignorance and from a lack of available tools. But we are preeminently cultural beings, guided by worldviews and shaped by senses of value. We will not use the world differently without significant shifts in prevailing culture, in the ways that we see and value the world and understand our place in it. If we want to follow a better path, improving our uses of nature, we must first change our cultural selves.
The work of cultural reconstruction can begin by looking to nature and recalling the fundamental truths about it and our dependence on it:
Nature is an exceedingly complex interlaced system involving millions of different species and a dazzling array of geophysical elements. These elements interact according to physical principles and biological processes, variously uniform and chaotic, processes that have evolved over time by fits and starts in ways that increase the diversity and complexity of life and enhance the planet’s overall productivity.
Nature’s productivity is directly linked to its ecological functioning in systemic terms. We depend upon that productivity for our sustenance and survival. As best we can tell (for instance, from the United Nation’s Millennium Assessment), we are overtaxing that productivity in critical ways and degrading the planet’s functional capacities. In one much-used phrasing, our overall ecological footprint is already bigger than the planet.
Our knowledge of nature is extensive but still woefully incomplete, and our capacity to gain knowledge through our senses and using reason and technology faces constraints. Even with computers the data about nature are overwhelming in terms of our capacity to bring them together in ways we can grasp.
As humans we are members of social and natural communities as well as individuals possessed of free will. We are defined in vital ways by our communal roles and our surrounding webs of interdependence as much as we are by our separateness.
As for morality and normative value in general, we are free to attribute or create it as we see fit within the constraints of free will; value does not come pre-packaged in the world, waiting for us to find it, and human rights are no exception. All are intellectual tools that help us navigate our ways, individually and collectively, in this world.
If we are to live well in nature over the long term our moral values and normative assessments need to be ones that help us do so: ones that accurately reflect nature’s ways and our dependence on it, that take into account our limited knowledge and nature’s dynamism, and that recognize the importance of healthy communities as such. It is thus misleading to say, though literally true, that we are free to choose cultural values as we like. Yes, we are largely free to choose, but different choices will lead to widely different outcomes, for people and nature.
The first building block, then, for a revitalized culture is an understanding of nature as an integrated community of life. Aldo Leopold decades ago termed it the “land community,” a community of rocks, soils, waters, plants, animals, and people. The land is a community and we are part of it, embedded in it and ultimately dependent upon it; this is the needed point of beginning. Nature is not simply a warehouse of resources and parts, some valuable, most worthless. It is not simply a place we draw upon for inputs for our economic system. It is the overall context in which we live, and everything we do must fit sensibly with in it. Our economy must be a subset of this land community and must operate in ways consistent with its healthy functioning.
It is perhaps not accurate to say that the parts of the land community cooperate with one another given that cooperation implies intentional volition and few parts of nature possess it. Still, the term best expresses the kind of evolved patterns of interaction that allow the parts of nature to endure over time and that make the system as a whole function and endure. As ecologist William Ophuls has put it, “If nature could be said to have an ethos, it is mutualism—harmonious cooperation for the greater good of the whole that simultaneously serves the needs of the parts.” Evolution, he relates, tends “toward a luxuriance of mutualistic symbioses.” As a result, “there is no such thing as an individual life because organisms cannot by themselves sustain life. For their sustenance, they depend completely on the whole system.”3
In the case of human life, our interdependence with other life forms and natural processes shows up on and in our bodies. They provide home to hundreds or thousands of different microorganisms, on our skin, in our mouths and digestive system. Our health is highly dependent on their presence; we could not live without them, nor in many instances they without us. So hugely varied are the life forms on and within a single human body that environmental philosopher Baird Callicott has taken to referring to an individual person as a superorganism. A human being is a highly integrated community of life forms that operates as a unit, even as it is complexly linked with and dependent upon surrounding life and physical elements.
Cultural reform, then, needs to begin with a new understanding of the nature of existence, with a new ontology. We need a foundational moral understanding that embeds us in webs of interdependence, one that gives as much emphasis to the webs of interdependence and to the community’s emergent properties as it does to the moral importance of the autonomous individual human as such. We need to begin, that is, by returning individuals to their natural homes, not losing our senses of individuality but blurring the lines and giving much greater value to the land community as such.
This land community in which humans are embedded can be more or less healthy in terms of its ecological functioning and its ability to withstand stresses and disturbances. This assertion—that communities as such can be healthy—is basically a normative claim, a claim of value that draws upon factual truths about nature but goes beyond those facts, just as all normative claims go beyond facts. Land health is thus not merely a description of nature; indeed, scientists would rightly object to it if it were presented that way. And this is so for reasons already covered at length—because it is a normative assertion, and normative values always reach beyond science. Land health is an ecologically based claim of value. And a powerful case can be made that it ought to stand as our preeminent claim of value, more important than the self-evident truths that Jefferson proposed.
The normative goodness of land health reflects the many benefits that we get from healthy lands. It reflects the many ways that well-functioning ecosystems are more valuable for us, generating (in recently popular language) more beneficial services than do ecosystems that function more poorly. But the normative value of land-community health isn’t simply about direct benefits to humans. It is about the welfare of the community as such. Land health benefits the community as a whole, including its human members; this is perhaps the better way to present it. In this light, our welfare as a single species is a component of, or derivative of, a welfare that transcends and includes us.
As for the health or welfare of the land community, it is best defined in terms of the general evolutionary trajectory toward greater primary productivity, toward increased interdependence, and toward improved efficiency in the uses and reuses of nutrients. In complex ways other life forms play roles in these ecological and evolutionary processes. The maintenance of land health accordingly requires the presence of these life forms in and among us as valued community members.
We cannot literally say that the land community as such values these functional attributes and evolutionary tendencies. It cannot, because the community is a not a conscious, valuing being. But these attributes of community functioning are hardly ones that we humans have created. They relate to the physical ways nature functions and has functioned over millions of years. They reflect the modes of functioning that directly sustain all life. As valuing beings, as the ones who attribute all moral value in the world, it is entirely appropriate for us to give these facts moral significance. It is appropriate for us in our moral thought to embrace the land community as an organic whole and to value it as such. We can embrace the health of this community as one of our guiding standards of goodness, in the same way that we view human health as good.
For these reasons, the healthy ecological functioning of that community—land health, for short—should become a prime value in our culture. We should choose it as a normative goal that we unceasingly promote. Its maintenance should become a prime focus of governmental efforts. On this point, we simply cannot have governmental neutrality; we cannot leave it to individuals to decide themselves whether they will or will not value the land community. We thus must affirmatively reject former Vice President Cheney’s ill-directed claim (and ones like it) that conservation is not a legitimate public policy.
Before bringing into this foundation-building process the next vital element—recognition of our ignorance—it is appropriate to consider briefly how land health as an overall goal relates to our uses of nonrenewable natural resources. Nonrenewable resources are parts of nature that we find valuable, that are limited in supply, and that are generated by nature, in human time-scales, either not at all or in quantities far less than we use. Nonrenewable resources pose challenges when it comes to keeping the earth equally valuable for future generations. Once used, nonrenewable resources are gone except as they can be recycled. Current use then inevitably reduces the supply available for future users. Tradeoffs are necessary, if the resources are to be used at all, and not simply put off-limits forever. How should we make these tradeoffs, consistent with land health as an overriding goal and with due regard for social justice, including justice toward future generations?
For starters, we might recognize that nonrenewable resources are often components of the earth—copper, for instance—that are embedded in the ground and play no roles in ecological functioning. Whether copper is or is not in the ground makes little difference to land health defined (as it is here) in functional terms. Of vastly greater concern to land health are parts of nature that are critical to ecological functioning—topsoil above all—and that are essentially nonrenewable because nature generates them so slowly. These resources, however, are ones that we can use without degrading or consuming them, and this plainly must be our goal. (Particularly topsoil has routinely been misused.) In terms of land health, then, we know what we need to do.
Social justice concerns are not so easily satisfied. Use of a resource today leaves it unavailable for future users. But present-future tradeoffs on resources use are likely less common and less important than we might first guess—or they would be in a culture that valued land health. Many nonrenewable resources are ones that generate grave ecological harms when they are extracted and used. Coal and oil are prime examples. Our use of these resources thus clashes with land health. For that reason alone we should stop using them, without any need to rely on a moral duty to keep them around for future generations. That still leaves us dependent on some resources that are nonrenewable. In the case of these, the best approach is simply to use them sparingly, recycle them fully, and push hard to find substitutes, particularly renewable ones.
Inevitably our understanding of this land community—our understanding, for instance, of the functional roles played by various species—is quite limited and likely will remain that way. We often talk about decision-making that takes place under conditions of uncertainty. Often more accurate and honest is a phrasing that openly confesses ignorance. Yes, in some settings we are knowledgeable but not quite certain of underlying facts. But in many others our knowledge is much less than that. Often we know very little, and can’t even gauge the depths of our ignorance.
This ignorance (a recognition of it, that is) needs to play significant roles in our cultural values. It can do so by prompting us to act more cautiously with nature, by encouraging slow, well-considered actions that anticipate surprises and leave ample room for mid-course corrections. A confession of ignorance encourages us to avoid placing bets we can’t afford to lose. It also means new burdens of proof to use in evaluating possible harms, burdens that err toward safety. The choice of a burden of proof, as already considered, is a normative question of importance, one that should be addressed thoughtfully and that, in dealings with nature, is very much public business. The same can be said about the types of evidence that should be heard and weighed when assessing claims of danger.
Much good conservation writing has centered on the inevitable incompleteness of our knowledge and how we might accept it. Agricultural pioneer Wes Jackson has explored the benefits of an “ignorance-based” approach to education, action, and governance. We are vastly more ignorant than we are knowledgeable, he teases, so we ought to go with our strength. We play to our ignorance, Jackson says, when we pay close attention to the way nature functions in a given setting and try to learn from it. What ways has nature evolved to inhabit a given landscape, with its particular climate, hydrology, terrain, and soils? How have life forms evolved so as to flourish under particular local conditions and with particular local disturbance regimes? The closer our modes of living mimic those of native species, the more likely they are to take advantage of nature’s embedded wisdom, even when we can’t really perceive that wisdom ourselves.
Our guiding principle, Jackson urges, should be to use nature as our measure. We should seek out and put to use lessons that have arisen through local evolutionary and ecological pressures. The closer we stay to nature’s choices—using local species, retaining maximum local diversity, respecting natural hydrological systems—the more likely our ways of living will endure under local circumstances. Jackson’s own much-cited work has involved research into new ways of farming, including new crops. He and his colleagues seek to grow food in the former tallgrass prairie using crops and methods that imitate the functional composition of the former prairie. This means, he says, practicing farming that relies on perennials rather than annuals, that uses a mixture of species rather than a monoculture, and that includes species that fix nitrogen in the soil to complement species that lack that capacity.
Nature-as-measure is the kind of cultural principle that could usefully apply widely. It deserves prominence. Forestry practices can mimic natural forests, using selective logging and mixed species while taking steps to maintain functionally important native species (often predators that keep herbivores in check). Nature’s ways of using semi-arid grasslands are similarly worth imitating, both in terms of grazing patterns and in the use of grazing animals that do not degrade waterways or require special protections against predators and pests. Lands should be used in ways for which they are ecologically well suited without material alteration—a line of thinking that will require major shifts in the presumed development rights of private landowners (an issue in the next chapter). Inevitably we need cities as places for large numbers of people to live; indeed, large cities can make good ecological sense when they significantly lighten the human presence in rural areas. Urban areas cannot remain ecologically healthy in any full sense of the concept of health. But they can be designed and reformed with specific reference to their effects on ecological processes—on water flows in particular.
Central to a new, ecologically grounded culture should be a long-term perspective, a recognition of the moral value of anticipating the needs of future generations and not curtailing their options or aggravating their burdens. The popular notion of sustainability gets at this point. As commonly interpreted, however, sustainability does not entail distinct limits on our uses of nature—on the sprawl of cities into the countryside, for instance. Instead it calls simply for more careful, planned expansion. But geographic expansion cannot go on indefinitely. It is not enough simply to consume irreplaceable nature more slowly. At some point, limits must be put in place, clear lines drawn and respected. And they need to be put in place, many of them, quite soon.
So far the discussion about respecting nature has spoken about the health of the land community in functional terms. Ecological health is an overall norm that should guide and constrain our uses of the landscapes we inhabit and the places where we get our food and resources. For many sound reasons, we are wise to use certain other lands far more lightly than this, and to set management goals for them that more closely mimic natural conditions. We should maintain certain places here and there—well-chosen places—in wilderness-like conditions, even as we admit that we have already altered all parts of the planet at least slightly and indirectly.
Critics might cry that wilderness is an artificial construct, a product of the human imagination, or that it is a conceit of wealthy people who do not have to go out and work the land. The reasoning involved in such claims is plain enough: It is far easier, yes indeed, to talk about leaving lands untouched when one draws an ample salary and is well fed. Even so, these criticisms of wild-lands preservation are all badly aimed. Of course the term “wilderness” is a human creation, as is the underlying idea. Of course (as some point out) early tribal peoples living in nature may have had no word in their vocabularies that referred to places in nature untouched by people (though likely they had words that referred to places that were spiritually charged). But these observations are diversionary and pointless. All words, all ideas, are human constructs. Given our plight we very much need words and ways to talk about lands only slightly affected by people, just as we need ways of talking about lands that have been extensively altered.
Areas maintained in wild condition—call them what we like—are essential to the long-term quest to live well on land. Their benefits have been catalogued again and again. Many benefits have to do with the maintenance of genetic diversity. Others have to do with the value of wilderness areas as places to study nature’s functioning, as ecological test-plots to help us see how we have altered other places and with what consequences. In his well-known final essay on wilderness, Aldo Leopold somberly anticipated that modern America’s attempt at the oldest task would end badly, particularly in semi-arid lands and other ecologically challenging places. They would end badly, much as earlier human efforts to endure in sensitive places already had. When that happened, Leopold urged, we would need to return to wilderness in search of a “more durable scale of values.” By that he meant a scale of values, drawn from the careful study of wilderness, which recognizes and respects nature’s ways of functioning in a given place.
Wild areas are repositories of evolved natural wisdom. They provide home to life forms that cannot thrive in and among people. Even as enclaves they can sustain ecological processes that benefit surrounding, human-occupied lands. Not incidentally, they also provide places for human recreation and awakening. In Leopold’s scheme of wilderness values, wilderness was needed most of all as a tool to help society gain virtue, particularly the virtues of humility and restraint. Wilderness preservation could play a key role in bringing about cultural transformation. Indeed, so central to Leopold was the role of wilderness in cultural change that he had doubts about land-protection efforts that did not have, as a central aim, the use of the lands to foster such change.
The literature on wild-lands protection, much of it penned by scientists, explores the standards that might best serve as management guides. Here we need only take note of the conclusions. The common sentiment is that wild lands should be managed, insofar as possible, so as to sustain the full range of species that lived on the lands at some point in the past, perhaps before industrialization came along, perhaps before European settlement arrived, perhaps even further back in time. Whichever time is picked, the normative claim is that we should retain as many then-resident species as possible and do so in numbers that approximate their then-existing populations. This normative goal is often talked about as the land’s native integrity. It is a goal focused more on biological composition—what species are present, and how many—rather than, as the goal of land health is focused, on a landscape’s ecological functioning. Species composition and ecological functioning, though, are closely tied. It isn’t possible to maintain the full panoply of species in a place without also maintaining something close to then-prevailing modes of ecological functioning. Integrity as a goal would similarly require the protection of biotic communities as such, not simply the protection of species one by one. In short, integrity has to do with the maintenance to the extent possible of natural conditions as of a particular time and taking into account the kinds of dynamic changes that would likely have unfolded even without any human presence. It should not need saying that, when offered as a value goal, integrity is a normative choice, not merely a scientific description.
Looking, then, at landscapes as a whole, a sensible overall goal is this: to maintain the ecological health (land health) in functional terms of all lands, and to go further in designated patches of wildness to get as close as possible to sustaining their integrity. Both parts of the goal, of course, need more sustained explanation and inquiry than they have here, and they have received it. Of course our knowledge of the underlying science remains limited, yet land health and integrity are nonetheless clear enough to stand as highly useful goals. They are clear enough to serve as shared normative ideals, on their way to becoming, we should hope, new self-evident truths.
The mention of land health and integrity draws attention to the roles of other life forms, more than eight million of them according to recent guesses. In the recent past, educated estimates about species numbers have varied from as low as three million to as high as 30 million, with a few estimates reaching to 100 million. To date taxonomists have identified and given names to some two million of them, with more turning up with every collection effort. Any overall number involves estimation. The challenge of counting species is heightened by a certain arbitrariness in deciding what we mean by a species and which life forms we count. Estimates of species diversity routinely exclude bacteria and certain other single-celled forms of life. The challenge of counting them would be truly immense. It is, it turns out, a serious research challenge simply to categorize and count the bacteria that live on and in the human body. That effort, the human biome project, is likely to go on for years. A major research effort is needed simply to take a spoonful of sand from a beach and identify the many types of microorganisms contained in it.
Looking ahead, looking toward a (literally) revitalized culture, we need to show greater respect for other life forms than we have. That much is clear. But for what reasons and to what extent?
A small proportion of all species are directly valuable to us and are rightly respected for that reason. Vastly more species are valuable in that they help sustain ecological processes and thus land health. We benefit from them in this indirect but essential way. As for which ones are functionally valuable our knowledge is highly incomplete, even in landscapes that have been long-studied. Presumably many are not, but it is difficult to say with any high degree of probability. A common normative claim is that we should keep all species around since we never know when a species might become valuable, either because we learn something new about it or because our circumstances shift. Many species could supply useful genetic material in future plant or even animal breeding. Others are useful simply because we enjoy seeing them or being around them, in zoos or in the wild. The direct and indirect benefits to us are many.
A central question in environmental philosophy has long centered on claims that other life forms, as individual animals or species, have or ought to have intrinsic value that we should respect, value that is unrelated to any benefit we receive from them. They have or should have value in and of themselves, without regard for how they affect us.
This normative claim is easier to engage when we realize that intrinsic value simply means (as noted earlier) value that humans attribute to a thing apart from any contribution it might make to human welfare (other than contributions to our sense of being virtuous). It does not mean—or certainly need not mean—value that exists apart from any human recognition or attribution of it. As for this latter kind of intrinsic value, many people have embraced it and still do. They embrace the idea that nature has a kind of value that existed before humans came along and will continue existing even after humans disappear. Such reasoning fits easily in many religious schemes (value put in place by God, not people). It is certainly not a line of thinking that can be rejected as nonsense. But the practical reality is that such intrinsic value, not arising by human choice, still requires humans to identify it and in some way legitimate it. It somehow has to enter into our consciousness if we are to take it into account. There thus remains a need for humans to decide consciously that a particular creature or species has value, whether they think they are creating the value themselves (a common philosophic stance) or believe instead that it exists apart from them (a common religious stance). Human decision is always needed, and the two types of decisions—attributing value and recognizing pre-existing value—do not differ much.
Many philosophers have resisted the idea that intrinsic value can exist in a category or intangible, such as a species or a biotic community or ecosystem. Their resistance arises because species and communities are not distinct physical things and value, they assert axiomatically, is an attribute of a thing, perhaps only a living thing. It is not clear, though, why this lack of physical thingness should be an objection to intrinsic value. We routinely value ideas and forms of knowledge, apart from any embodiment of them. A Shakespeare play is valuable as a literary composition apart from any printing of it; for many, the character Harry Potter is valuable even though entirely fictional. A species may be a human-created category, a mental concept, but it is a concept that refers to real patterns among physical creatures; it is a way of talking about real, physical differences in the world much as gravity is a real physical force. Biotic communities also have real existence in that they are unique combinations of living creatures and physical elements that interact in special ways. To deny that a biotic community can have value apart from its living components is much like saying that a great painting has no value apart from the oil paint and canvas used to create it.
It is thus entirely sensible to attribute value to species and communities as such, just as it is sensible to attribute value to other living creatures and to special physical places and features in landscapes. From many perspectives, an earnest, collective desire to protect all life forms is a morally worthy and honorable stance. It is a moral position that reflects a grasp of the limits on human knowledge, particularly on our ability to distinguish valuable life forms from expendable ones. It also reflects a virtuous willingness to act cautiously, leaving room to correct our inevitable mistakes. The disappearance of a species in a landscape is often (though not always) a signal of ecological change that diminishes the landscape’s functioning and is morally troubling for that reason. Species loss highlights the fact that change is taking place and that a landscape is consequently less suitable for at least one life form. In the religious mind, all forms of life might possess value due to their divine origins and have value for that reason. Value might also be attributed to species and communities as a way of highlighting the importance of protecting them so future human generations can enjoy them. In short, the reasons for protecting all species are numerous and, when combined, quite potent.
Far easier for many people is to sense that other life forms have moral value as individual living creatures, particularly mammals with high mental functioning. The focus here is on individual beings as such, apart from the instrumental roles they may play and the benefits they confer in particular ecosystems. This moral reasoning is mostly aimed at animals, rarely at individual plants. Typically it is strongest in the case of animals that do not live in the wild—companion animals, zoo animals, and domesticated animals generally. People have removed these animals from any natural home and typically bred or raised them so that, quite often, the animals could hardly survive in the wild. Having stripped them of the chance to live in the wild we take responsibility for their fates.
Much animal-welfare sentiment has risen up independently of any concern about ecological degradation generally. That is, concerns about environmental decline and those about animal welfare often exist separately. At quick glance the two concerns might seem closely joined if not overlapping, and they can be. But concern for individual animals as such can also collide with concerns about ecological systems and this collision needs to be understood.
The health of a land community requires a mix of species interacting in healthy ways and with populations of these resident species limited to functionally reasonable levels (not too low or high). When humans intervene in natural systems—as we have, essentially everywhere—they trigger changes to these mixes of species and population levels. Often, human intervention causes some populations to rise far above the numbers they would have otherwise had. Such species can become pests in the sense that they alter their home landscapes in ways that bring declines for many other species—other forms of life that are also presumably valuable—and declines also in productivity and functioning. How should we respond when a handful of species explode in numbers like this? Should we think about the health of the land community as such or (instead or in addition) pay attention to the value and welfare of each animal individually?
This question produces different answers from people, reflecting differing normative stances. The perspectives can particularly clash in clear ways when the call goes out to cull particular populations by hunting or through other mortal methods as a way of reducing excessive numbers. Deliberate killing can certainly seem inconsistent with even a modest moral concern for the creatures being killed. On the other side, when people have indirectly caused an animal population to irrupt, harming other species and perhaps land functioning, then people have brought on the harms themselves and might feel morally responsible for them. In this light, the effort to control one population (by hunting, trapping, poisoning, or introducing predators) is, in effect, an effort to curtail the harms being imposed indirectly on other species. Hunting an overly abundant species therefore diminishes the overall human impact on nature, rather than expand it.
The claim that individual, nonhuman animals ought to have moral value, elevating them above rocks (where Descartes famously put them), is an argument that has long encountered a stiff headwind. One reason is likely a concern about what it would mean to attribute value in this way. Animal advocates typically argue their case for expanded moral coverage by using a particular mode of reasoning, one that draws upon Western moral thought after its turn toward individualism. The point of beginning for the pro-animal argument is that humans are morally worthy creatures because of some attribute or capacity that they possess. If this is so, then it makes logical sense (consistent with the principle of equality) to conclude that nonhuman creatures should possess moral value if and when they also possess this same value-creating attribute or capacity. The argument, that is, is basically deductive in form. Attribute or capacity A is the source of moral value (a general normative claim); certain nonhuman animals along with humans possess A (specific factual claim), which means these other creatures should also possess moral value (deductive conclusion). The reasoning is sound, and thus the conclusion, so long as the key normative premise—that moral value arises from A—is correct. Of course most if not all animal-welfare advocates have strong sentiments about animals and are likely motivated by these sentiments. But they are nonetheless inclined, when presenting their arguments fully (academics above all), to steer clear of sentiments and preferences and to respect the cult of public objectivity.
This reasoning, predictably, has led to speculation and disagreement about the all-important attribute or capacity A that allegedly gives rise to moral value. What is it that makes humans morally special? A long-time Judeo-Christian answer was that humans were special because they were created in the image of God. Other species, it was thought, were specifically created to serve human needs in some way, if only to provide illustrations of how people should and should not live. In the medieval era it was often said humans were different because they possessed religion or could speak and reason. By the seventeenth century, reasoning tended to focus on the presence or absence of a soul; this was the defining human feature. Because other species (it was said) lacked souls, they were no different morally from other complex, noise-making machines.
Recent literature, addressing this age-old issue, has tended to focus instead on neurological functioning, ignoring earlier religious reasoning and any reference to souls. In one view, the key value-creating attribute is simply the ability to feel pain and thus to suffer, the point of view embraced by Jeremy Bentham whose moral reasoning gave primacy of place to pleasure and pain. Other writers point instead to consciousness or some similar high form of mental functioning as the key attribute. More narrowly drawn is the claim that moral value resides in self-awareness and an ability to anticipate the future and chart a life course. A few writers have contended that we should avoid drawing a single line between the moral haves and have-nots. Instead, moral value might rise up by stages based on several specific capabilities, leading not to two distinct moral categories (moral haves and have-nots) but to gradations of moral worth. In all of this reasoning, the guiding idea, again, is that if the morality-giving trait can be agreed upon, then other creatures that share the trait would rise up in moral terms.
This reasoning, it should be clear, is very much an expression of the current confusion about morality and its bases. It reflects also the modern tendency in public affairs to push normative issues aside and speak in objective terms. Objectively speaking, an argument can be made in favor of certain animals if it begins with an agreed-upon source of moral value—hence the search for such an all-important, moral-vesting attribute or capacity. The pro-animal argument thereby doesn’t have to start by proposing a new source of morality, which it couldn’t do in any nonsubjective way.
A far more likely explanation of our current moral worldview, however, is that humans have moral value, not due to any elusive attribute A (based on brain functioning or otherwise), but simply because we are human. We have value, that is, because we think and say that we do, because we have decided that we do. It is a stance we embrace as a moral normative axiom, a self-evident truth. It is not a conclusion we have reached using facts and inductive reasoning. (The claim that high mental functioning [a fact] creates moral value [a normative stance] in any case looks like a questionable jump from is to ought.)
Over the millennia, as noted, peoples have largely embraced a different, more limited axiom. They have typically confined moral value to people like themselves or to people within their group: to “our” people or the chosen people, and not others. Slowly, painfully, this moral axiom has given way to a new one in which all humans have value. It is this history of extension in the moral community that animal-welfare advocates draw upon when they push to expand the community beyond the species line. But it is not clear that this can happen given the many differences between people and other species. More important, it is not clear either that the argument is needed or that it is strategically prudent.
Driving the long expansion of moral value to all humans has been the claim that differences among people are not morally important, their races, religions, ethnicity, sex, nationality, and so on. Humans have value—that is the basic moral view—and that should mean all humans, not some artificially bounded subset of them. Expansion did take place, the circle of morally worthy people did expand. But there is little sense in this history of expansion that humans possess value because (and only because) of some particular capability that they display, some specific difference between them and other species. Rather, it has unfolded because of the lack of any morally meaningful differences among people themselves. People reside within the moral community circle (once a small community, now global) simply by reason of their humanity, as Christian scriptures affirmed long ago.
Animal-welfare writing in a sense simply wants to toss out this axiom and replace it with a different, new axiom. It would start not with the axiom that all humans have moral value, but with the claim that some larger group of creatures has value based on some particular identified factor. There is nothing at all illegitimate about this approach. But the chosen reasoning nonetheless reflects our current confusion about moral principles, where they come from, and what makes them legitimate—topics all covered earlier (chapter 3). Moral values, as we’ve seen, emerge out of deep-seated moral sentiments mixed together in the formative stage with facts about the world and our powers to reason. Our collective moral sense today is that people have moral value, and we act on that sense. We could, in exactly the same way, embrace the stance that other creatures also have moral value. And we could do so simply because we feel that this is so, because our deep-seated sense is that humans are not all that different, as Darwin long ago told us. Facts and logic might well help in this effort. But they are not really needed. It is entirely legitimate to press the pro-animal moral stance directly and emotionally and to invite others to join in embracing it. We are, to repeat, value-creating beings.
In all likelihood, the appeal of the animal-welfare stance is mostly based in sentiment. That being so, it is diversionary if not confusing to offer arguments that are so strictly logical and fact-based. To frame the argument in this way is to ignore the foundation of morality in sentiment. Indeed, it is implicitly to discredit the legitimacy of such sentiment. The message embedded in it is that morality exists only when it can be supported, if not proved, by facts and reason. Yet this simply isn’t true. Moreover, it is a message that, overall, is quite hostile to expansions of moral value, whether the expansion is to other living creatures as such, to species or to entire communities. The logic-based argument might work for many audiences in the case of moral value for high-functioning primates; such animals are perhaps similar enough to people for the argument to work. But it isn’t likely to work in gaining moral standing for communities, wild rivers, and special landscapes—all of which are too different from humans for any extensionist argument to help. In the meantime, the noisy disagreement among animal-welfare advocates, as they search for the elusive attribute A, makes the whole intellectual effort seem inconclusive if not arbitrary. Why should moral value rest on one capacity rather than another; on one fact rather than another? There is no good answer because morality, as we should know, doesn’t arise from facts alone. Reason alone is not adequate to select among the many proposed attributes, nor is it, in truth, adequate to show that the humans-only moral view is somehow bad.
What we need to see more clearly is that value comes through a process of collective choice. Sentiment is a central guide for that choice, probably the most important one. When we see this then we can more readily also see that the value we attribute to other living creatures need not be the same as the value of humans. It can be moral value of a different kind, just as moral value attributed to a species or biotic community can be quite different. It is, accordingly, wrong to assert (as critics sometimes do) that if animals have moral value (even rights) then they must be put on the same level as humans. Not so. Similarly, it is wrong to assert that the case for animal welfare fails because it has not been proven, or that it rests on logic that isn’t airtight. Proof and logic have nothing to do with it. Moral sentiments do.
The reasons for respecting individual wild creatures—beyond the direct benefits to us already mentioned—can be quickly mentioned. They overlap with the reasons for protecting species and biotic communities. Other creatures play important ecological roles, often ones that we dimly understand. We also have good cultural reasons for showing them more respect, without regard for any desires to do so. Efforts to protect other creatures can help foster the cultural values of restraint and humility. They can lead us to alter nature more gently, in ways that yield multiple benefits. Beyond that, they can help instill senses of awe toward nature and toward the capabilities of other creatures, enhancing our sense of being participants in a larger community of life as distant kin of all other life forms.
The points of beginning proposed in this chapter together invite a significant turn in the course of Western culture. They pose, in particular, a challenge to the dominance of liberal individualism in its political guises all across the political spectrum. The form of right-living that they project is essentially a communitarian one, not a liberal one. As a moral stance it aligns better with the true temperament, evolutionary breeding, and physical needs of humans, especially as social beings. The lone individual can get ahead and perhaps thrive through aggressive, self-centered competition. The species as a whole cannot.
Front and center in a better-grounded culture is the land community. It is the big picture of which all else it is a part, our source of sustenance and inescapable home. This land community of over eight million species is complex far beyond our understanding and its productivity depends upon this complexity. It turns, not just on its great variety in life forms, but on their evolved ways of interacting that have given rise to capacities much greater and different than the capacities of the parts in isolation. Life as we know it would grind to a halt if nature were completely fragmented, if it were turned into the kind of resource warehouse we seem to think it is.
Nature is not a stockpile of resources. Nor is it well understood as flows of resources (the early twentieth century view) or as flows of ecosystem services (the twenty-first-century revision). It is an integrated community of life of which we are a part, an overall whole in which the components cannot be understood except in relation to the whole. Well tended it is a fine place for human life. Well tended, that is, it is the kind of natural home we have been designed by evolution to inhabit. This land community can be more or less healthy in its functioning. Particular landscapes can also be more of less whole in their integrity. Our success at our oldest task requires us to maintain this overall health. It requires also that we retain diverse landscapes that display here and there something close to the integrity they had centuries ago. By all appearances, these goals in turn require major changes in our behavior, which means, at root, major changes in modern culture.
The trajectory of modern liberal culture (Western culture particularly) is one that has entailed a good deal of line drawing. The embrace of a new, ecological cultural stance will involve blurring many of these lines, even erasing them here and there. In a common formulation, modernity is a worldview in which time and life are linear and progressive rather than circular, in which lines are drawn between past, present, and future. Renaissance humanism, extended by Enlightenment thought, vested humankind with greater moral value, distinguishing it more clearly from other life and celebrating its unique powers. That sharper line, between humans and other life, soon gave rise to further line-drawing among individuals and to an unprecedented emphasis on the individual human as such. Mind drew apart from matter; reason drew apart from sentiment; logic drew apart from intuition—not completely in any case but in theory and in many ways in practice. The physical matter of the world was divided from realms of spirit; divinities increasingly were transcendent, no longer immanent. For people, the personal realm pulled further from the public realm, exposing yet another fault line. Except on issues of public safety and a few key public services, religious and moral values were pushed onto one side of that dividing line, the private side, while objectivity was left to rule on the other side, the side increasingly dominated by science and the science-garbed discipline of economics.
All of this line-drawing, we must see, came with great benefits and also with great costs. Looking ahead, the quest is to retain these benefits as best we can while greatly reducing their associated costs. Inevitably this will mean reform efforts that blur all of these lines. The blurring can’t be wholesale, and certainly not haphazard. What’s needed is blurring based on sound ecological knowledge and on the kind of deep-seated sentiments that can give rise to new understandings of morality, to moral orders that reflect our lives as members of social and ecological communities, and that call us to higher moral planes in our dealings with other life and future generations.
In the age-old story man took a bite of the apple in Eden and gained special knowledge of good and evil or some power over it. It’s a story worth taking seriously for it captures our earthly plight. We do, in a sense, have the power to define right and wrong, good and evil. But consequences flow from our choices, and we shall live with and be responsible for them.