4.1 The value of nature

If you remember back to last week, in Part II of his paper, Elliot describes his belief that the value of nature lies in the fact that ‘they are representative of the world outside our dominion, because their existence is independent of us’ (p. 86). You shall return to this idea in a moment. First, listen to what Erich Hatala Matthes has to say about the value of nature (once more, the quality is not as good as it could have been because it was recorded over Skype).

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Transcript: Erich Hatala Matthes on the value of nature

ERICH HATALA MATTHES

So when it comes to thinking about the value of nature, I think it's important to keep in mind that nature can be valuable in a lot of different ways. We should be pluralists about the value of nature, because that kind of position is really responsive to the range of ways in which people value nature. Generally, I think when you're thinking about the value of a particular thing, it's very important to look at evaluative behaviour, right? How do people value a particular thing? What kinds of considerations do they cite when they talk about the value of a particular place, for instance?

So one of the values that you might think that nature can have is aesthetic value, right? People talk a lot about the beauty of the landscape, about natural beauty. And you might think that it's important to have natural beauty available to you.

In keeping with some of Robert Elliott's concerns about the independence of nature, you might also think that there's value in having places that you can go to that aren't so managed or constructed in the way that a lot of our human environments are, so that you can opportunities to escape from that kind of highly constructed environment or built environment into an environment that has a kind of independence that plays by different rules than a highly managed place. So you might think there's a special kind of value there.

Granted, there's an interesting sort of complication there, right, because some one thing that people say who are advocates for the value of wilderness, right, where wilderness is understood as really sort of separate from, independent from humans, is that if humans go there, they are, by that very fact, getting in the way of that wilderness value, because they're inserting themselves into a place the value of which is supposed to be understood as independent from humans. So then we get into sort of actual legislation about wilderness spaces, for instance, you get these sort of funny locutions about land that is untrammelled, or land that where humans don't have permanent occupations. So they try to make space for the idea of people being able to be visitors in wilderness spaces without that perverting the particular kind of value that value they have as wilderness.

So those are some of the values that we can think of nature as having. There are, of course, also values that nature has that have other kinds of direct impact on human wellbeing, right? So ecosystem services, for instance, providing clean air, clean water. There's all those kinds of practical benefits that natural spaces can have.

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Erich Hatala Matthes on the value of nature

Hatala Matthes argues that ‘we should be pluralists about the value of nature’. Among the values placed on nature is its relative independence of people – as stressed by Elliot – as well as its natural beauty and what he calls ‘ecosystem services’.

Focus now, however, on the value that Elliot stresses: on natural things being valuable ‘because their existence is independent of us’. In some ways, this is a contradictory idea. Think about what other things Hatala Matthes claimed to be found valuable about nature: its having natural beauty ‘available’ and the benefits it brings in terms of ‘direct impact on human well-being’. In these instances, nature is valuable exactly because it is not independent of human beings; it has a direct effect on people in terms of providing them with beauty, or with clean air and clear water. Given this, how can the value of something reside in it being ‘outside our dominion’; in it not having a ‘direct impact’ on people?

This question leads to the heart of the issues concerning value. Are there values that are not, ultimately, just values for human beings? This course has been focusing on one example: pristine nature. The argument has been that it has a value that can counter-balance the values that can be extracted from it by, for example, mining or fracking. That is, the value of being independent of human beings. Here is another example: historical value. Huge amounts of resources are put into preserving old stuff. Ancient monuments aren’t simply knocked down when building roads, or medieval castles destroyed to put up cheap housing. Hatala Matthes states that ‘The historical properties of objects offer us a genuine connection to the past. Though we cannot go back in time, the objects and places that were present in the past travel forward in time with us’ (Matthes, 2013, p. 61). The claim is that some of the value of both pristine nature and the past is because it exists ‘outside our dominion’; independent of whatever needs or desires human beings have just at the moment.