5 Erich Hatala Matthes

When it comes to the question of what would be important, for instance, about preserving a natural space that, for instance, a mining company claims that they can sort of strip-mine an area and then restore it and bring back the space just the way it was before, then I think we do get into the kinds of considerations that Elliott was concerned about, about the space having a particular history and what the value is of having that particular history.

So people who are proponents of the idea that we can just destroy some aspect of nature and then restore it, I think, need to they are hard-pressed to think about analogous cases where we don't have that kind of intuition, often, about degradation and restoration. So people usually aren't going to accept the idea that you could destroy some great work of art, for instance, and then create a replica, and the replica would be just as good. It would be the same. It might be good in a lot of ways, especially if people can't tell the difference between the original and the replica. You might think that there is still important value in having that kind of high-quality replica to increase access for people. It could provide educational opportunities. If the original was lost through war or some kind of act of terrorism, you might think it's better to have the replica than to have nothing, for instance.

But you can think all of those things without thinking that the replica is in every respect just as good as the original. It would have lost one thing at least. It wouldn't have that same particular history that the original had. And so we might think the same thing about natural places. They have some of their value not all of their value, but some of their value consists in having this particular history that developed over time in a certain way. And if you were to simply destroy something and then try to recreate it, it would lack that particular kind of history and so wouldn't have at least that value.