Hettinger & Throop on Wildness and Ecocentrism
- Ecocentrism needs to shift its focus away from valuing and protecting stability and
integrity toward valuing and protecting wildness (=naturalness)
- For ecologists dispute notions of integrity and stability
- Definition of wild (natural) = non-humanized = not influenced, altered, controlled by humans
- Wildness comes in degrees: A/C building, parking lot with weeds, tree farm, national
park, wilderness area
- Examples suggest wildness is valuable
- Elective plastic surgery, natural child birth vs c-section, picking raspberries versus
buying in store, catching wild trout versus stocked trout, Old Faithful regulated by
soap
- General intuitions supporting wildness value
- Value existence of a realm not significantly under human control (weather,
seasons, tides)
- Human control of when rain, when spring comes and tides run--undesireable
- Value being part of a world not of our own making
- Need for limits to human mastery and domination of the world
- Value of confronting, honoring, celebrating the other
- Importance for human humility
- True there are "biophobes" (who profess to dislike things not under human control)
- Valuing wildness is a rational response to the increasing humanization of the
planet
- Some value wildness without calling it that or knowing that they do
- Gardening, bird watching, golfing, dinner on porch, walks in park are
valued in part as they put us in touch with nonhuman nature
- Wildness is a significant value-enhancing property
- Transforms and intensifies other values
- Biodiversity (human created-genetically engineered organisms versus
wild biodiversity)
- Beauty intensified by wildness, diminished by humanization (pollution
sunsets)
- Wildness value "puts a brake on" human improvements of nature (increasing an
ecosystem's biodiversity, integrated-functioning, health, stability)
- Value of wildness is contextual (depends on context)
- Wildness not of much (any?) value for Pleistocene humans
- But of great value in today's world: Wildness becoming increasingly rare so
increasingly valuable
- Wildness valuable on earth, perhaps less so in other galaxies
- Wildness value not necessarily overriding importance
- Both anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric values can trump wildness value
- Stop lightening lit fire on small island with endemic species (biodiversity
trumps wildness)
- Antarctica though more wild may be of less value than Amazon rainforest
which is less wild, but more biodiverse
- Wild things can have value subtracting qualities that outweigh their wildness
value (e.g., hurricane)
- Valuing wildness is not same as valuing the pleasure we get from contemplating wildness
- This confuses byproduct of valuing (pleasure) with what is being valued
- Similarly, valuing a friend is not to simply to value the pleasure one gets from her
- Is wildness value objective/subjective? Aesthetic, moral, or religious?
- No wildness left to value? Entire earth been humanized by early humans and by
modern global pollution?
- Reply
- Wildness comes in degrees; can value the less human dominated places
- Humanization can "washout" and wildness can return over time
- But aren't humans part of nature?
- Valuing wildness falsely and unhelpfully dichotomizes human and nature and ignores the
Darwinian insight that humans are part of nature (thoroughly part of nature)?
- Reply: Humans and human activities are natural (part of nature) in some ways and
unnatural (not part of nature) in others
- Ways humans part of nature:
- To a significant extent, humans are the result of and embedded in natural
processes
- Dimensions of human life are manifestations of wild nature: letting our bodies
reflect the impacts of sun, wind, and aging; acting on instinct-letting spontaneous
processes of nature unfold within us
- Value wild in humans as well as nonhuman nature (Thoreau: a tragedy to
civilize every part of man as to cultivate every acre on earth
- Ways humans separate from nature
- Human activity needs to be explained and understood in terms of technological,
social, economic, political, religious, and moral dimensions
- Little in nonhuman nature even begins to involve these dimensions
- Grave mistake for an environmental ethic to interpret and evaluate human influences on
nature as no different from the influence of other species or natural phenomena