Holmes Rolston

Value in Nature and the Nature of Value

I offer myself as a nature guide, exploring for values. Many before us have got lost and we must look the world over. The unexamined life is not worth living; life in an unexamined world is not worthy living either. We miss too much of value.

Human values and natural systems

What human values are carried by natural systems? I can answer that question directly while I indirectly address a deeper question. Are values in nature objective or subjective? Some values (the nutrition in a potato) seem objectively there, while others (the eagle as a national symbol) seem merely assigned. Either way, certain experiences that humans find to be valuable require and are carried by natural things. As we examine the types of natural values, we can wonder whether—at times at least—value intrinsic in nature enables humans to enjoy these values.

Values gone wild.

Wilderness valued as mere resource for human‐interest satisfaction is challenged in favor of wilderness as a productive source, in which humans have roots, but which also yields wild neighbors and aliens with intrinsic value. Wild value is storied achievement in an evolutionary ecosystem, with instrumental and intrinsic, organismic and systemic values intermeshed. Survival value is reconsidered in this light. Changing cultural appreciations of values in wilderness can transform and relativize our judgments about appropriate conduct there. A final valued element in wildness is its idiographic historical particularity, and most surprising is the emergence of a novel morality when humans learn to let values go wild.

The land ethic at the turn of the millennium

Aldo Leopolds land ethic has proved more complex and subtle than he envisioned. Nevertheless, Leopold launched what, facing a new millennium, has proved urgent on the global agenda: an environmental ethics concerned in theory and practice about appropriate respect for values carried by the natural world and human responsibilities for the sustaining of these values. A blending of anthropocentric and biocentric values continues to be vital. These duties toward nature involve analysis of ecosystem integrity and evolutionary dynamism at both scientific and philosophical levels; any responsible environmental policy must be based on plausible accounts of ecosystems and a sustainable biosphere. Humans and this planet have entwined destinies. We now envision an Earth ethic beyond the land ethic.

Caring for Nature: What Science and Economics Can't Teach Us but Religion Can

Neither ecologists nor economists can teach us what we most need to know about nature: how to value it. The Hebrew prophets claimed that there can be no intelligent human ecology except as people learn to use land justly and charitaxad bly. Lands do not flow with milk and honey for all unless and until justice rolls down like waters. What kind of planet ought we humans wish to have? One we resourcefully manage for our benefits? Or one we hold in loving care? Science and economics cant teach us that; perhaps religion and ethics can.

Aesthetics in the swamps.

Next began the muskegs, which almost entirely stood under water; these we had to cross for miles; think with what misery, every step up to our knees. . . . The whole of this land of the Lapps was mostly muskeg, here called stygx. A priest could never so describe hell, because it is no more horrible. Never have poets been able to picture the Styx so foul, since that is no fouler.—CAROLUS LINNAEUS (1732) [1, vol. l, pp. 141-42]

Saving Nature, Feeding People, and the Foundations of Ethics

I welcome my thoughtful critics. If there is to be progress in environmental ethics, it will result from interchanges such as these. I start with my recent experience in Nepal, using that to bring to initial focus where I think my differences with Attfield, Brennan, and Minteer lie. Later I turn, in too summary a way, to some more specific complaints. Royal Chitwan National Park in Nepal is a primary sanctuary for Bengal tigers and the Asian rhinoceros, both extremely endangered species. Other endangered species protected in the area are the sloth bear, the pygmy hog, the swamp deer, the black buck, the Asian rock python, and the gharial crocodile (the worlds most endangered crocodile). The park exists because the region, in lowland Nepal, was too malarious to live in year round until the 1 950 s. In earlier years, what is now the park area was kept as a hunting preserve for the Rana rulers of Nepal in the dry season. Oddly, the tigers and rhinos survived because of the mosquitoes. Following a mosquito eradication campaign in mid-century, Nepalis began to move into the region. The migrants cleared the forests and started cultivating crops, also poaching animals. In 1973, to increase protection, the hunting preserve was designated a national park. Nepalis were surrounding it. The population of the Terai (lowland) region was 36,000 in 1950; in less than a decade it was one million. With one of the highest birthrates in the world, and with the influx continuing, the population in 199 1 was 8.6 million, 90 percent of them poor, 50 percent of them desperately poor (Nepal and Weber 1993; Shrestha 1997). No one is allowed to live in the park. People complain that they cannot cut grasses, graze cattle and buffalo, or timber the park at will. They are allowed to cut thatch grasses several days a year, and 30 percent of park income is given to Village Development Committees. The Royal Nepalese Army is responsible for preventing poaching, grazing, cutting grasses, pilfering timber, and permanent habitation of the land. They also do what they can to improve the lot of the people. But being hungry ip not a sufficient reason to sacrifice the park. That problem must be fixed by attacking its root social causes, even though, alas, in my visit to Nepal during January and February of this year, I did not find any answers in sight.

The Bible and Ecology

The Bible is not a book of science, and therefore not of ecology. It does, however, sketch a vision of human ecology, and contemporary readers encounter claims about how to value nature. The Bibles vision is simultaneously biocentric, anthropocentric, and theocentric. The Hebrews discovered who they were as they discovered where they were, and their scriptures can be a catalyst in our ecological crisis.

Science, advocacy, human and environmental health.

Medicine and public health sciences are applied sciences. The research upon which these are based is mission-oriented and as such they are underlain by advocacy. Ecological sciences, by way of parallel, involve managing ecological systems so they can remain healthy to support productive natural processes and the human population. In any eco-system, however, renewal has associated with it naturally occurring background levels of diseases and death. These are normal in all biological systems. Sustainable development has been focused on commodity-based, managed systems where the goal is to ensure that the needs of growing human populations are met, producing healthy people. This objective is deemed by the Ecological Society of America to be too narrow. Priority should rather be given to the sustainability of natural ecosystems, otherwise the biosphere that sustains all life forms is neglected. Epidemiologists concerned with the health of populations need to recognize that human health and the health of natural systems have entwined destinies. Some convictions about limits, about the role of disease, degeneration, and death in healthy, that is, stable and sustainable human ecologies, ought to be embedded into any ethics for epidemiologists.

Terrestrial and Extraterrestrial Altruism

How Earthbound are values and ethics? We humans enjoy a surprising transcendence of localized body and place. We are always situated somewhere, but it does not follow that all our knowledge is situational. True, science is a human enterprise. True, ethics is a human activity—even biologically-based. But can we expect to share some of our science and ethics with extraterrestrials? Perhaps in the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, the question to ask is not about the value of π, or the atomic number of carbon. A more revealing test might be to ask whether one should tell the truth, keep promises, or be just. The Golden Rule may be as universally true as is the theory of relativity.