Jim Moran explores the philosophy of environmentalism:
At a conference in the 1970s, to challenge human-centered attitudes towards nature, the philosopher Richard Routley (who later called himself Richard Sylvan) described the following thought experiment. Suppose you’re the last person alive after a global catastrophe, and you have the power to destroy all that’s left of nature. You realize that no other person would ever be affected by its loss, since there’s no one else left. Routley argues that our clear intuition is that it still would not be right to destroy the natural world. This suggests that natural beings and objects have intrinsic value, regardless of their practical value to humans. We need to respect nature because it is right to do so, not because of some benefit it bestows on us.
A related discussion of where the environmentalism movement went wrong here.
(Photo: A native plant sprouts from the soil of the Cerrada plains in western Brazil on January 30, 2011.The Pantanal area, a sanctuary of biodiversity, is presently in risk because of the intensive culture of soybean and the deforestation, scientists said. By Yasuyoshi Chiba/AFP/Getty Images)
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