ABSTRACT
Human beings have two basic kinds of emotional relations to nature: gratitude and a sense of peace, on the one hand, terror and stimulation on the other. Few who are concerned about conservation and the environment will suppose that the answers have to be exclusively human answers in the further sense that the policies they recommend should exclusively favour human beings. A sense that human beings should not see the world as simply theirs to control, is often thought to have a religious origin, and a ‘secular’ or ‘humanist’ attitude is thought to be in this, as in other respects, anthropocentric. The badness of environmental effects would then be measured in terms of the effect on human experience basically, our dislike or distaste for what is happening. Not all our environmental concerns will be grounded in Promethean fear.
