ROLSTON, CNV, CHAP VI: INTRINSIC NATURAL VALUES

• 1. LIFE AS CONSERVATION
• All organisms
• Have ends of their own (though not consciously sought ends) a kind of non-felt purpose
• Have a good of their own
• Defend their own good;
• Are self-maintaining systems that grow, resist dying, reproduce, can be healthy or diseased, repair wounds
• Conserve, values their lives
• "Physical state that organism seeks is a valued state"
• So a being can value even thought it lacks consciousness?
• Non-sentient organisms are examples of beings that possess objective and intrinsic natural value
• 4. INTEGRITY OF PLACE
• Abiotic entities have objective value
• Examples
• Antarctica (awe, respect, even though pretty much lifeless)
• Grand Canyon
• Angel Hair (fine threads of crystal in Mammoth cave
• Nonbiotic works of nature protected at cost of depriving humans access
• Natural kinds like crystals, volcanoes, geysers, rivers, moons, cirques, mesas, canyons
• Do not have organic integrity, but a type of integrity: tectonic
• Can identify them from background
• Have beginnings and endings
• Headings, trajectories
• Grace, harmony
• Creative products of nature
• And there is value wherever (sufficient?) positive creativity
• Nature of the obligations/value
• Objective value
• Lays claim on human behavior
• Appropriate and inappropriate consideration and treatment of these objects and responsive (or not) behavior toward them
• Deserve appreciation
• Better ways to behave in these places that recognizes their site integrity
• Examples of disrespectful treatment
• Spray-painting walls in caves
• Roads to top of fourteen-thousand foot mountains
• Soap in geysers
• Carving a president's head into half dome in Yosemite
• Some "environmental art"
• Abiotic entities without such value
• Not all abiotic natural entities have such value
• For example, clouds and dust devils have little integrative process and are too temporary to generate obligations
• 5. WILDERNESS
• Wilderness: A place untrammeled by man, where human works do not dominate the landscape and which is affected primarily by the forces of nature and where humans are visitors who do not remain
• Rolston defends wilderness against recent attacks against "wilderness environmentalism" for separating humans and nature, for ignoring the extent of human impact on the planet (no wilderness is left), for imposing a western ideal on the rest of the world to the detriment of their chance for development, that it is a "lock-up use" that prevents people from using nature, that it is elitist.
• Rolston doesn't want humans to be included in nature everywhere
• Humans belong on the planet, but belonging somewhere is not belonging everywhere
• Native peoples did not so affect the landscape that it can no longer be legitimately considered wilderness
• Wilderness (as opposed to the wilderness preservation movement) is not cultural creation
• Nor is the value of wilderness culturally relative or an ethnocentric ideal
• Any culture (whether it accepts it or not) ought to (or should have) set aside some wildland where nature can do its own thing
• Some non-western cultures have this ideal as well
• 7. END OF NATURE
  • Power of end of nature story
• We live in a human made world
• For example, the predation pressure has been altered and rain with detectable pollutants is present in ever square inch of Yellowstone
• Steve Packard's claim that nature is dependent on us now to restore it
  • Claims it is like aged parents being dependent on their children
• This would be a very sad thing-a tragedy--as McKibben claims
• If only wild animals were in zoos, only wild flowers ones we had restored
• A nature that depended on us, would be a nature (wild nature) that has ended
• Rolston rejects end of nature claim:
  • "Doesn't follow that nature absolutely ended because not absolutely present."
• Wildness can return on own or by restoration
• Nature can be more or less natural even with humans in the picture
• Even if humans have knocked nature off into a new trajectory, a new wild nature can return
• E.g., If Pleistocene humans did kill off megafauna of North America this would change forever the nature of the North American continent
• But this does not mean that wilderness areas in N.A. today are not wild/natural
• Rolston is worried about a future end of wild nature; production of an artifactual world
• Global warming, global spread of toxins, mass extinction continues on and on, these really will bring nature (as we know it?, wild nature) to an end.
• Era of spontaneously self-organizing systems of wild nature with integrity will be over
• Scale issue: We can destroy faster than earth can recover, though it certainly will recover on its own time scale of millions of years