It’s been a mild winter, to say the least. Today was the first day I’ve had to walk to school through the snow. I’ve taken to eating my lunch outside of the campus radio station, and the lack of inclement weather has been a focal point of their environmental hour, no surprise. There’s nothing like visible changes in the patterns of our lives to get us all a-shaking with fright about the consequences of our actions. It seems awfully fitting that the usually-nasty-now-nice January is the month in which I have started my environmental ethics class.
This week we are opening the discussion on deep ecology, the main premise of which is that the environment has intrinsic value and therefore should be protected. One of our articles discussed the feelings of awe, respect, and even love that the environment inspires in people who behold it at its most wondrous – we wouldn’t spend the money to see ocean reefs and tropical rainforests and misty, rolling hillsides if we didn’t think that we would get some sort of experience from them beyond, “Oh. A hill. That’s that, then.” These feels of awe, respect, and love, the article says, are moral instincts; they are our physical body telling us that something extraordinary is happening through goosebumps and the desire to whisper.
I know that sounds like bollocks; even though the logic is there, the sentimentality overpowers it. I liked this side of the argument better: The Kiidk’yaas was a Sitka Spruce tree with rare genetic mutation that made its needles gold. It was very old and very sacred to nearby Native tribes, until in 1997, Grant Hadwin got a chainsaw. He felled the tree. When my professor told this story, accompanied by pictures of the Kiidk’yaas standing out in all its golden glory from the spruces surrounding, everyone in the lecture hall gasped in horror. Why? Well, because of moral instinct, that’s why. Yes, we can explain why we feel this way, but the reaction is really just that: it’s a reaction. We immediately feel that there is something wrong with this situation.
It's the big golden one.
The other article we read was a sceptic’s response to deep ecology. The premise upon which deep ecology is based, said the author, is dogma. That is, deep ecologists feel the need to protect the environment because they feel it has intrinsic value, and they feel it has intrinsic value because of the way they feel when experiencing nature. Deep ecologists approach this feeling as fact, and believe that anyone who experiences nature and does not experience a sense of awe, respect, and love must be misperceiving somehow, and that these people must be corrected. This is dogma in the purest sense of the word: The views are not changed to suit the facts, but the facts are changed to suit the views. The fact is, not everyone walks through a deeply wooded area and feels a oneness with their surroundings. They’re not misperceiving. They’re not immoral. They’re not wrong. They just don’t feel about nature the way that deep ecologists do.
I have been close with my grandfather since I was born, and he has been close with nature all his life. He has always been my contrary evidence to the villainous hunters in Disney movies. I remember going with him to his shack in the bush, how quiet it was – nothing but the bird song and the sound of melting snow dripping into our footprints. I remember spreading out food for the deer and bears that lived there so that they’d be fat through the winter and keep bringing forth strapping young. I remember helping him skin two clean kills and driving back into the bush the next day to hang their hearts in a tree. My grandfather thanked the animals he killed, and used them to feed his family. He returned their hearts to the woods because he thought that to keep the heart of the animal would be some form of blasphemy, and that if he did, he would never get a good shot again. Other animals ate the deer’s hearts and in that way they stayed in the forest, feeding and growing the ecosystem. Naturally, growing up with such a man, I have always felt as though nature were alive and conscious. I walk through the woods and feel myself in nature’s thoughts – but all the same, I understand that there are people a-plenty out there who walk through the woods thinking, “God damn, the mosquitoes out here are monstrous” and nothing more.
They’re not wrong – first because the mosquitoes are monstrous and second because it’s their opinion. Whether or not nature has intrinsic value is likely not something we’re going to get a definitive answer on within our lifetime. Until we do, I think there’s something we can agree on.
Whether nature’s value is intrinsic or not, nature does have value. It could very well be that nature’s only value is as a resource to humanity or as an aesthetic feature in our lives, but it’s valuable. Without it, we couldn’t exist.
It is at this point that my question becomes whether it is equally as productive to preserve the environment for our sakes as it is to preserve nature for its own sake. It would be nice if it were feasible to say, “Going by moral instinct, we just won’t do whatever feels wrong.” What feels wrong to one person doesn’t necessarily feel wrong to another, and the world is not a lecture hall of four hundred students who have the time and resources to effectively hash out which option can claim the moral high ground. Can we reconcile deep ecology’s protection of nature with the values of people who don’t believe that nature has intrinsic value? Will sustainability work as well if we’re doing it for ourselves?
In the words of many a hippie, “I just, like, don’t know, man.”
*No it isn’t.
