FROM The Environmental Challenge
A river tumbles through steep wooded valleys and rocky gorges toward the sea. The state hydroelectricity commission sees the falling water as untapped energy. Building a dam across one of the gorges would provide three years of employment for a thousand people, and longer-term employment for twenty or thirty. The dam would store enough water to ensure that the state could economically meet its energy needs for the next decade. This would encourage the establishment of energy-intensive industry in the state, thus further contributing to employment and economic growth.
The rough terrain of the river valley makes it accessible only to the reasonably fit, but it is nevertheless a favored spot for bushwalking. The river itself attracts the more daring white-water rafters. Deep in the sheltered valleys are stands of Huon pine, thousands of years old. The valleys and gorges are home to many birds and animals, including an endangered species of marsupial mouse found in only one other place in Australia. There may be other rare plants and animals as well, but no one knows, for scientists have yet to investigate the region fully.
Should the dam be built? This is one example of a situation in which we must choose between very different sets of values. The description is clearly reminiscent of the controversy over the proposed dam on the Franklin River, in Tasmania’s southwest, although I have not tried to make it exact, and it should be treated as a hypothetical case.1 Many other examples would have posed the choice between values equally well: logging virgin forests, building a paper mill that will release pollutants into coastal waters, or opening a new mine on the edge of a national park. A different set of examples would raise related, but slightly different, issues: banning the use of CFCs to prevent the depletion of the ozone layer; restricting the use of fossil fuels in an attempt to slow the greenhouse effect; mining uranium, where the issue is not the potential damage to the area around the mine but the hazards of nuclear fuel. My aim in this chapter is to explore the values that underlie debates about these decisions, and the example I have presented can serve as a point of reference for these debates. I shall focus particularly on the values at issue in controversies about the preservation of wilderness, because here the fundamentally different values of the two parties are most apparent. On controversies like water pollution and the control of greenhouse gases, the difference in values tends to be obscured by scientific debates on what is really happening, what the costs are, and what measures will be effective. When we are talking about flooding a river valley, the choice before us is starkly clear.
In general terms, we can say that those who favor building the dam are valuing employment and a higher per capita income for the state above the preservation of wilderness, of plants and animals (both common ones and members of an endangered species) and of opportunities for outdoor recreational activities. Some fundamental questions of philosophy lie behind this difference of values. In what follows, I shall assume that the values we hold may properly be subjected to rational scrutiny and criticism: they are not simply matters of taste, about which argument is futile.2 Before we begin to scrutinize the values of those who would have the dam built and those who would not, however, let us briefly investigate the origins of modern attitudes toward the natural world.
The Western Tradition
Western attitudes toward nature grew out of a blend of those of the Hebrew people, as represented in the early books of the Bible, and the philosophy of ancient Greece, particularly that of Aristotle. In contrast to some other ancient traditions—for example, those of India—both the Hebrew and the Greek traditions made human beings the center of the moral universe; indeed not merely the center, but very often the entirety of the morally significant features of this world.
The biblical story of creation makes very clear the Hebrew view of the special place of human beings in the divine plan:
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.3
Today Christians debate the meaning of this grant of “dominion”; and those concerned about the environment claim that it should be regarded not as a licence to humanity to do as they will with other living things, but rather as a directive to look after them, on God’s behalf, and be answerable to God for the way in which they are treated.4 There is, however, little justification in the text itself for such an interpretation; and given the example God set when he drowned almost every animal on earth in order to punish Noah for his wickedness, it is no wonder that people should think the flooding of a single river valley is nothing worth worrying about. After the flood there is a repetition of the grant of dominion in more ominous language:
And the fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air, upon all that moveth upon the earth, and upon all the fishes of the sea; into your hand are they delivered.5
The implication is clear: to act in a way that causes fear and dread to everything that moves on the earth is not improper; it is, in fact, in accordance with a God-given decree.
The most influential early Christian thinkers had no doubts about how human dominion was to be understood. “Doth God care for oxen?” asked Paul, in the course of a discussion of an Old Testament command to rest one’s ox on the sabbath, but it was only a rhetorical question—he took it for granted that the answer must be negative, and the command was to be explained in terms of some benefit to humans.6 Augustine shared this line of thought; referring to stories in the New Testament in which Jesus destroyed a fig tree and caused a herd of pigs to drown, Augustine explained these puzzling incidents as intended to teach us that “to refrain from the killing of animals and the destroying of plants is the height of superstition.”7
When Christianity prevailed in the Roman Empire, it also absorbed elements of the ancient Greek attitude toward the natural world. The Greek influence was entrenched in Christian philosophy by the greatest of the medieval scholastics, Thomas Aquinas, whose lifework was the melding of Christian theology with the thought of Aristotle. Aristotle regarded nature as a hierarchy in which those with less reasoning ability exist for the sake of those with more:
Plants exist for the sake of animals, and brute beasts for the sake of man—domestic animals for his use and food, wild ones (or at any rate most of them) for food and other accessories of life, such as clothing and various tools.
Since nature makes nothing purposeless or in vain, it is undeniably true that she has made all animals for the sake of man.8
In his own major work, Summa Theologica, Aquinas followed this passage from Aristotle almost word for word, adding that the position accords with God’s command, as given in Genesis. In his classification of sins, Aquinas has room only for sins against God, ourselves, or our neighbor. There is no possibility of sinning against nonhuman animals or against the natural world.9
This was the thinking of mainstream Christianity for at least its first eighteen centuries. There were gentler spirits, certainly, like Basil, John Chrysostom, and Francis of Assisi, but for most of Christian history they have had no significant impact on the dominant tradition.10 It is therefore worth emphasising the major features of this dominant Western tradition, because these features can serve as a point of comparison when we discuss different views of the natural environment.
According to the dominant Western tradition, the natural world exists for the benefit of human beings. God gave human beings dominion over the natural world, and God does not care how we treat it. Human beings are the only morally important members of this world. Nature itself is of no intrinsic value, and the destruction of plants and animals cannot be sinful, unless by this destruction we harm human beings.
Harsh as this tradition is, it does not rule out concern for the preservation of nature, as long as that concern can be related to human wellbeing. Often, of course, it can be. We could, entirely within the limits of the dominant Western tradition, oppose the mining of uranium on the argument that nuclear fuel, whether in bombs or power stations, is so hazardous to human life that the uranium is better left in the ground. Similarly, many arguments against pollution, the use of gases harmful to the ozone layer, the burning of fossil fuels, and the destruction of forests could be couched in terms of the harm to human health and welfare from the pollutants, or the changes to the climate that may occur as a result of the use of fossil fuels and the loss of forest. Since human beings need an environment in which they can thrive, the preservation of such an environment can be a value within a human-centred moral framework.
From the standpoint of a form of civilization based on growing crops and grazing animals, wilderness may seem to be a wasteland, a useless area that needs clearing in order to render it productive and valuable. There was a time when villages surrounded by farmland seemed like oases of cultivation among the deserts of forest or rough mountain slopes. Now, however, a different metaphor is more appropriate: the remnants of true wilderness left to us are like islands amid a sea of human activity that threatens to engulf them. This gives wilderness a scarcity value that provides the basis for a strong argument for preservation, even within the terms of a human-centered ethic. That argument becomes much stronger still when we take a long-term view. To this immensely important aspect of environmental values we shall now turn.
Valuing the Future
A virgin forest is the product of all the millions of years that have passed since the beginning of our planet. If it is cut down, another forest may grow up, but the continuity has been broken. The disruption in the natural life cycles of the plants and animals means that the forest will never again be as it would have been had it not been cut. The gains made from cutting the forest—employment, profits for business, export earnings, and cheaper cardboard and paper for packaging—are short-term. Once the forest is cut or drowned, however, the link with the past is gone forever. That may be regretted by every generation that succeeds us on this planet. True wilderness now has a high value because it is already scarce. In the future, and considering the world as a whole, it is bound to become scarcer still. It is for that reason that environmentalists are right to speak of wilderness as a “world heritage.” It is something that we have inherited from our ancestors, and that we must preserve for our descendants if they are to have it at all.
In contrast to many more stable, tradition-oriented human societies, our modern political and cultural ethos has great difficulty in recognizing long-term values. It is notorious that politicians rarely look beyond the next election; but even if they do, they will find their economic advisers telling them that anything to be gained in the future should be discounted to such a degree as to make it easy to disregard the long-term future altogether. Economists have been taught to apply a discount rate to all future goods. In other words, a million dollars in twenty years is not worth a million dollars today, even when we allow for inflation. Economists will discount the value of the million dollars by a certain percentage, usually corresponding to real long-term interest rates. This makes economic sense, because if I had a thousand dollars today I could invest it so that it would be worth more, in real terms, in twenty years. But the use of a discount rate means that values gained one hundred years hence rank very low in comparison with values gained today, and values gained one thousand years in the future scarcely count at all. This is not because of any uncertainty about whether there will be human beings or other sentient creatures inhabiting this planet at that time, but merely because of the cumulative effect of the rate of return on money invested now. From the standpoint of the priceless and timeless values we can gain from the wilderness, however, applying a discount rate gives us the wrong answer. There are some things that, once lost, no amount of money can regain. Thus to justify the destruction of an ancient forest on the grounds that it will earn us substantial export income is problematic, even if we could invest that income and increase its value from year to year; for no matter how much we increased its value, it could never buy back the link with the past represented by the forest.
This argument does not show that there can be no justification for cutting any virgin forests, but it does mean that any such justification must take full account of the value of the forests to the generations to come in the more remote future, as well as in the more immediate future. This value will obviously be related to the particular scenic or biological significance of the forest; but as the proportion of true wilderness on the earth dwindles, every part of it becomes significant, because the opportunities for experiencing wilderness become scarce, and the likelihood that a reasonable selection of the major forms of wilderness will be preserved is reduced. Moreover it is not only the people who visit a wilderness who gain from its presence. Popular support for wilderness preservation is far broader than could be the case if only those who visited were in favor of preserving it. It seems that people like to “know that it is there” even if they never see it except on their television sets.
Can we be sure that future generations will appreciate the wilderness? Perhaps they will be happier sitting in air-conditioned shopping malls, playing computer games more sophisticated than any we can imagine. That is possible, but there are several reasons why we should not give this possibility too much weight. First, the trend has been in the opposite direction: the appreciation of wilderness has never been higher than it is today, especially among those nations that have overcome the problems of poverty and hunger and have relatively little wilderness left. Wilderness is valued as something of immense beauty, as a reservoir of scientific knowledge still to be gained, for the unique recreational opportunities that it provides, and because many people just like to know that something natural is still there, relatively untouched by modern civilization. If, as we all hope, future generations are able to provide for the basic needs of most people, we can expect that, for centuries to come, they too will value wilderness for the same reasons that we value it.
Second, arguments for preservation based on the beauty of wilderness are sometimes treated as if they were of little weight because they are “merely aesthetic.” That is a mistake. We go to great lengths to preserve the artistic treasures of earlier human civilizations. It is difficult to imagine any economic gain that we would be prepared to accept as adequate compensation for the destruction of the paintings in the Louvre, for instance. How should we compare the aesthetic value of a wild river valley or a virgin forest with that of the paintings in the Louvre? Here, perhaps, judgement does become inescapably subjective, so I shall report my own experiences. I have looked at the paintings in the Louvre, and in many of the other great galleries of Europe and the United States. I think I have a reasonable sense of appreciation of the fine arts, yet I have not had, in any museum, experiences that have filled my aesthetic senses in the way that I experience when I walk in a natural setting and pause to survey the view from a rocky peak overlooking a forested valley, or sit by a stream tumbling over moss-covered boulders set among tall green tree-ferns. I do not think that I am alone in this. For many people, wilderness is the source of the greatest feelings of aesthetic appreciation; even nonreligious people tend to describe it in terms of a spiritual experience.
It may nevertheless be true that this appreciation of nature may not be shared by people living a century or two hence. But if wilderness can be the source of such deep joy and satisfaction, that would be a great loss. Moreover, whether future generations value wilderness is up to us; it is, at least, something we can influence. By our preservation of areas of wilderness, we provide an opportunity for generations to come, and by the books and films we produce, we create a culture that can be handed on to our children and their children. If we feel that a walk in the forest, with senses attuned to the appreciation of such an experience, is a more deeply rewarding way to spend a day than playing computer games, or if we feel that to carry one’s food and shelter in a backpack for a week while hiking through an unspoiled natural environment will do more to develop character than watching television for an equivalent period, then we ought to encourage future generations to have a feeling for nature; if they end up preferring computer games, we shall have failed.
Finally, if we preserve intact the amount of wilderness that exists now, future generations will at least be able to have the choice of getting up from their computer games and going to see a world that has not been created by human beings. They may like to know that some parts of the world in which they are living are much as they were before we humans developed our fearsome powers of destruction. At present, there are still both wilderness and nonwilderness areas. If we destroy the wilderness, that choice is gone forever. Just as we will spend large sums to preserve cities like Venice, even though future generations conceivably may not be interested in such architectural treasures, so we should preserve wilderness even though it is possible that future generations will care little for it. Thus we will not wrong future generations, as we have been wronged by members of past generations whose thoughtless actions have deprived us of so many possibilities, like the chance of glimpsing the thylacine when walking through Tasmanian forests. We must take care not to inflict equally irreparable losses on the generations to follow us.
Thus a human-centered ethic can be the basis of powerful arguments for what we may call “environmental values.” Even from the perspective of such an ethic, economic growth based on the exploitation of irreplaceable resources can be seen as something that brings gains to the present generation, and possibly the next generation or two, at a price that will be paid by every generation to come. The price to be paid by future human beings is too high. But should we limit ourselves to a humancentered ethic? We now need to consider more fundamental challenges to this traditional Western approach to environmental issues.
Is There Value Beyond the Human Species?
Although some debates about significant environmental issues can be conducted by appealing only to the long-term interests of our own species, in any serious exploration of environmental values a central issue will be whether there is anything of intrinsic value beyond human beings. To explore this question we first need to understand the notion of “intrinsic value.” Something is of intrinsic value if it is good or desirable in itself; the contrast is with instrumental value, which is value as a means to some other end or purpose. Our own happiness, for example, is of intrinsic value, at least to most of us, in that we desire it for its own sake. Money, on the other hand, is only of instrumental value to us. We want it because of the things we can buy with it, but if we were marooned on a desert island, we would not want it (whereas happiness would be just as important to us on a desert island as anywhere else).
Now consider again for a moment the issue of damming the river described at the beginning of this chapter. Should the decision be made on the basis of human interests alone? If we say that it should, we shall balance the economic benefits for Tasmanians of building the dam against the loss for bushwalkers, scientists, and others, now and in the future, who value the preservation of the river in its natural state. We have already seen that because this calculation includes an indefinite number of future generations, the loss of the wild river is a much greater cost than we might at first imagine. Even so, if we are justified in arguing that the decision whether to dam the river should be made on the basis of values that include, but are not limited to, the interests of human beings, we may have much more to set against the economic benefits for Tasmanians of building the dam. We may take into account the interests of the animals who will die if the valley is drowned; we may give weight to the fact that a species may be lost, that trees that have stood for thousands of years will die, and that an entire local ecosystem will be destroyed; and we may give the preservation of the animals, the species, the trees, and the ecosystem a weight that is independent of the interests of human beings—whether economic, recreational, or scientific—in their preservation.
Here we have a fundamental moral disagreement: a disagreement about what kinds of beings ought to be considered in our moral deliberations. Many people think that once we reach a disagreement of this kind, argument must cease. As I have already briefly indicated, I am more optimistic about the scope of rational argument in ethics. In ethics, even at a fundamental level, there are arguments that should convince any rational person. Take, as an example, a view held by one of the founders of the Western ethical tradition: Aristotle’s notorious justification of slavery. Aristotle thought that captured barbarians were “living instruments”—that is, human beings who were not of intrinsic value but existed in order to serve some higher end. That end was the welfare of their Greek captors or owners. He justified this view by arguing that barbarians were less rational than Greeks and, in the hierarchy of nature, the purpose of the less rational is to serve the more rational.11
No one now accepts Aristotle’s defense of slavery. We reject it for a variety of reasons. We would reject his assumption that non-Greeks are less rational than Greeks, although given the cultural achievements of the different groups at the time, that was by no means an absurd assumption to make. More importantly, from the moral point of view, we reject the idea that the less rational exist in order to serve the more rational. Instead we hold that all humans are equal. We regard racism and slavery based on racism as wrong because they fail to give equal consideration to the interests of all human beings. This would be true whatever the level of rationality or civilization of the slave, and therefore Aristotle’s appeal to the higher rationality of the Greeks would not have justified the enslavement of non-Greeks, even if it had been true. Members of the “barbarian” tribes can feel pain, as Greeks can; they can be joyful or miserable, as Greeks can; they can suffer from separation from their families and friends, as Greeks can. To brush aside these needs so that Greeks could satisfy much more minor needs of their own was a great wrong and a blot on Greek civilization. This is something that we would expect all reasonable people to accept, as long as they can view the question from an impartial perspective and are not improperly influenced by having a personal interest in the continued existence of slavery.
Now let us return to the question of the moral status of those who are not humans. We shall consider, first, nonhuman animals. In keeping with the dominant Western tradition, many people still hold that all the nonhuman natural world has value only or predominantly insofar as it benefits human beings. A powerful objection to the dominant Western tradition turns against this tradition an extended version of the objection just made against Aristotle’s justification of slavery. Many nonhuman animals are also capable of feeling pain, as humans are; they can certainly be miserable, and perhaps in some cases their lives could also be described as joyful; and members of many mammalian species can suffer from separation from their family group. Is it not therefore a blot on human civilization that we brush aside these needs of nonhuman animals to satisfy minor needs of our own?
Rejecting the dominant Western tradition in this way makes a radical difference to the value basis on which we should consider environmental policy. Into the calculations about damming the river must now go the interests of all the nonhuman animals who live in the area that will be flooded. A few may be able to move to a neighboring area that is suitable, but wilderness is not full of suitable niches awaiting an occupant; if there is territory that can sustain a native animal, it is most likely already occupied. Thus most of them will die: either they will be drowned, or they will starve.
Neither drowning nor starvation is an easy way to die, and the suffering involved in these deaths should, as we have seen, be given no less weight than we would give to an equivalent amount of suffering experienced by human beings. That, in itself, may be enough to swing the balance against building the dam. What of the fact that the animals will die, apart from the suffering that will occur in the course of dying? Are we also to weigh the deaths of nonhuman animals as equivalent to the deaths of a similar number of human beings? If so, it would seem that almost no development of any area can be justified; even industrial wastelands provide habitat for rodents who will die if the land is built upon. But the argument presented above does not require us to regard the death of a nonhuman animal as morally equivalent to the death of a human being, since humans are capable of foresight and forward planning in ways that nonhuman animals are not. This is surely relevant to the seriousness of death, which, in the case of a human being capable of planning for the future, will thwart these plans, and which thus causes a loss that is different in kind from the loss that death causes to beings incapable even of understanding that they exist over time and have a future. It is also entirely legitimate to take into account the greater sense of loss that humans feel when people close to them die; whether nonhuman animals will feel a sense of loss at the death of another animal will depend on the social habits of the species, but in most cases it is unlikely to be as prolonged, and perhaps not as deep, as the grief that humans feel. These differences between causing death to human beings and to nonhuman animals do not mean that the death of a nonhuman animal should be treated as being of no account. On the contrary, death still inflicts a loss on the animal—the loss of all its future existence, and the experiences that that future life would have contained. When a proposed dam would flood a valley and kill thousands, perhaps millions, of sentient creatures, these deaths should be given great importance in any assessment of the costs and benefits of building the dam.
Let us summarize the conclusions reached so far. We have seen that the dominant Western tradition would restrict environmental values to human interests; but this tradition is based on an indefensible prejudice in favor of the interests of our own species. We share our planet with members of other species who are also capable of feeling pain, of suffering, and of having their lives go well or badly. We are justified in regarding their experiences as having the same kind of value as our own similar experiences. The infliction of suffering on other sentient creatures should be given as much weight as we would give to the infliction of suffering on human beings. The deaths of nonhuman animals, considered independently from the suffering that often accompanies death, should also count, although not as much as the deaths of human beings.
Is There Value Beyond Sentient Beings?
Reverence for Life
The position we have now reached extends the ethic of the dominant Western tradition but in other respects is recognizably of the same type. It draws the boundary of moral consideration around all sentient creatures but leaves other living things outside that boundary. This means that if a valley is to be flooded, we should give weight to the interests of human beings, both present and future, and to the interests of the wallabies, possums, marsupial mice, and birds living there; but the drowning of the ancient forests, the possible loss of an entire species, the destruction of several complex ecosystems, and the blockage of the wild river itself and the loss of those rocky gorges, are factors to be taken into account only insofar as they adversely affect sentient creatures. Is a more radical break with the traditional position possible? Can some or all of these aspects of the flooding of the valley be shown to have intrinsic value, so that they must be taken into account independently of their effects on human beings or nonhuman animals?
To extend an ethic in a plausible way beyond sentient beings is a difficult task. An ethic based on the interests of sentient creatures is on recognizable ground. Sentient creatures have wants and desires. They prefer some states to others. We can therefore, though with much imaginative effort and no guarantee of success, form an idea of what it might be like to be that creature under particular conditions. (The question “What is it like to be a possum drowning?” at least makes sense, even if it is impossible for us to give a more precise answer than “It must be awful.”) In reaching moral decisions affecting sentient creatures, we can attempt to add up the effects of different actions on all the sentient creatures affected by the alternative actions open to us. This provides us with at least some rough guide to what might be the right thing to do. But there is nothing that corresponds to what it is like to be a tree dying because its roots have been flooded. Once we abandon the interests of sentient creatures as our source of value, where do we find value? What is good or bad for nonsentient creatures, and why does it matter?
It might be thought that as long as we limit ourselves to living things, the answer is not too difficult to find. After all, we know what is good or bad for the plants in our garden: water, sunlight, and compost are good; extremes of heat or cold are bad. The same applies to plants in any forest or wilderness, so why can we not regard their flourishing as good in itself, independently of its usefulness to sentient creatures?
One problem here is that without conscious interests to guide us, we have no way of assessing the relative weights to be given to the flourishing of different forms of life. Is a two-thousand-year-old Huon pine more worthy of preservation than a tussock of grass? Most people will say that it is, but such a judgment seems to have more to do with our feelings of awe for the age, size, and beauty of the tree, or with the length of time it would take to replace it, than with our perception of some intrinsic value in the flourishing of an old tree that is not possessed by a young grass tussock.
If we cease talking in terms of sentience, the boundary between living and inanimate natural objects becomes more difficult to defend. Would it really be worse to cut down an old tree than to destroy a beautiful stalactite that has taken even longer to grow? On what grounds could such a judgement be made? Probably the best-known defense of an ethic that draws the boundaries of ethics around all living things is that of Albert Schweitzer. The phrase he used, “reverence for life,” is often quoted; the arguments he offered in support of such a position are less well known. Here is one of the few passages in which he defended his ethic:
Just as in my own will-to-live there is a yearning for more life, and for that mysterious exaltation of the will which is called pleasure, and terror in face of annihilation and that injury to the will-to-live which is called pain; so the same obtains in all the will-to-live around me, equally whether it can express itself to my comprehension or whether it remains unvoiced.
Ethics thus consists in this, that I experience the necessity of practising the same reverence for life toward all will-to-live, as toward my own. Therein I have already the needed fundamental principle of morality. It is good to maintain and cherish life; it is evil to destroy and to check life.12
A similar view has been defended recently by the contemporary American philosopher Paul Taylor. In his book Respect for Nature, Taylor argues that every living thing is “pursuing its own good in its own unique way.” Once we see this, we can see all living things “as we see ourselves” and therefore “we are ready to place the same value on their existence as we do on our own.”13
The problem with the defenses offered by both Schweitzer and Taylor for their ethical views is that they use language metaphorically and then argue as if what they had said was literally true. We may often talk about plants “seeking” water or light so that they can survive, and this way of thinking about plants makes it easier to accept talk of their “will to live,” or of their “pursuing” of their own good. Once we stop, however, to reflect on the fact that plants are not conscious and cannot engage in any intentional behavior, it is clear that all this language is metaphorical; one might just as well say that a river is pursuing its own good and striving to reach the sea, or that the “good” of a guided missile is to blow itself up along with its target. It is misleading of Schweitzer to attempt to sway us toward an ethic of reverence for all life by referring to “yearning,” “exaltation,” “pleasure,” and “terror.” Plants experience none of these.
Moreover, in the case of plants, rivers, and guided missiles, it is possible to give a purely physical explanation of what is happening; and in the absence of consciousness, there is no good reason why we should have greater respect for the physical processes that govern the growth and decay of living things than we have for those that govern nonliving things. This being so, it is at least not obvious why we should have greater reverence for a tree than for a stalactite, or for a single-celled organism than for a mountain; and we can pass silently by Taylor’s even more extraordinary claim not merely that we should be ready to respect every living thing but that we should place the same value on the life of every living thing as we place on our own.
Deep Ecology
More than forty years ago the American ecologist Aldo Leopold wrote that there was a need for a “new ethic,” an “ethic dealing with man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it.” His proposed “land ethic” would enlarge “the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively, the land.”14 The rise of ecological concern in the early 1970s led to a revival of this way of thinking. The Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess wrote a brief but influential article distinguishing between the “shallow” and “deep” forms of ecological thinking. Shallow ecological thinking was limited to the traditional moral framework; those who thought in this way were anxious to avoid pollution to our water supply so that we could have safe water to drink, and they sought to preserve wilderness so that people could continue to enjoy walking through it. Deep ecologists, on the other hand, wanted to preserve the integrity of the biosphere for its own sake, irrespective of the possible benefits to humans that might flow from so doing.15 Subsequent writers who have attempted to develop some form of deep environmental theory include the Americans Bill Devall and George Sessions, and the Australians Lawrence Johnson, Val Plumwood, and Richard Sylvan.16
Where the reverence-for-life ethic emphasises individual living organisms, proposals for deep ecology ethics tend to take something larger as the object of value: species, ecological systems, even the biosphere as a whole. Leopold summed up the basis of his new land ethic thus: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”17 In a paper published in 1984, Arne Naess and George Sessions set out several principles for a deep ecological ethic, beginning with the following:
1. The well-being and flourishing of human and non-human Life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the non-human world for human purposes.
2. Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realization of these values and are also values in themselves.
3. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs.18
Although these principles refer only to life, in the same paper Naess and Sessions say that deep ecology uses the term “biosphere in a more comprehensive non-technical way to refer also to what biologists classify as ‘nonliving’; rivers (watersheds), landscapes, ecosystems.” Sylvan and Plumwood also extend their ethic beyond living things, including in it an obligation “not to jeopardize the well-being of natural objects or systems without good reason.”19
Behind this application of ethics not only to individuals but also to species and ecosystems lies some form of holism—some sense that the species or ecosystem is not just a collection of individuals but really an entity in its own right. This holism is made explicit in Lawrence Johnson’s A Morally Deep World, probably the most detailed and carefully argued statement of the case for an ethic of deep ecology yet to appear in print. Lawrence is prepared to talk about the interests of a species in a sense that is distinct from the sum of the interests of each member of the species, and to argue that the interests of a species or an ecosystem ought to be taken into account, with individual interests, in our moral deliberations.
There is, of course, a real philosophical question about whether a species or an ecosystem can be considered the sort of individual that can have interests; and even if it can, the deep ecology ethic will face problems similar to those we identified in considering the idea of the reverence-for-life ethic. For it is necessary not merely that trees, species, and ecosystems can properly be said to have interests, but that they have morally significant interests. We saw in discussing the ethic of reverence for life that one way of establishing that an interest is morally significant is to ask what it would be like for the entity affected to have that interest unsatisfied. This works for sentient beings, but it does not work for trees, species, or ecosystems. There is nothing that corresponds to what it is like to be an ecosystem flooded by a dam. In this respect trees, ecosystems, and species are more like rocks than they are like sentient beings; so the divide between sentient and nonsentient creatures is to that extent a firmer basis for a morally important boundary than the divide between living and nonliving things or holistic entities.
If we were to adopt an ethic that attributed value to nonsentient living things, or to ecosystems as a whole, we would need to have a criterion of what made something more valuable than something else. Naess and Sessions, in common with many other deep ecologists, suggest “richness” and “diversity”; sometimes the term used is “complexity.”20 But what is it for something to be rich, diverse, or complex? Did the introduction of European birds into Australia make our birdlife richer and more diverse? If it could be shown that it did, would that make it a good thing? What if we should discover that allowing effluent from intensive farms to seep into our rivers greatly increases the number of microorganisms that live in them—thus giving rivers a different but more diverse and more complex ecosystem than they had before they were polluted. Does that make the pollution desirable?
To seek intrinsic value in diversity or complexity is a mistake. The reason why we may feel more strongly about destruction of diverse and complex ecosystems than about simpler ones (such as a field of wheat) may be the same as the reason why we feel more strongly about preservation of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel than we do about the preservation of the ceiling of the Lecture Theatre H3 at Monash University (which is painted a uniform white). To break up Michelangelo’s fresco into handy-sized chunks for sale to tourists would be lucrative, and no doubt the Vatican could put the money to good use in fighting poverty (better use than that usually made of the returns from damming rivers or clearing forests); but would it be right to do so? The objection, in both cases, is to vandalism: the destruction, for short-term gain, of something that has enduring value to sentient beings, is easy to destroy, but once destroyed can never exist again.
If the philosophical basis for a deep ecology ethic is difficult to sustain, this does not mean that the case for the preservation of wilderness is not strong. All it means is that one kind of argument—the argument for the intrinsic value of the plants, species, or ecosystems—is, at best, problematic. We are on surer ground if we confine ourselves to arguments based on the interests of sentient creatures, present and future, human and nonhuman. In my view the arguments grounded on the interests of present and future human beings, and on the interests of the sentient nonhumans who inhabit the wilderness, are quite sufficient to show that, at least in a society where no one needs to destroy wilderness in order to survive, the value of preserving the remaining significant areas of wilderness greatly exceeds the values gained by their destruction.