ABSTRACT
The satisfactory resolution to our current environmental crisis, many scholars have suggested, might not simply involve a strictly pragmatic and technical solution but rather a more intensive scrutiny and questioning of our basic assumptions concerning the value of the non-human wild world. For, they suggest, the roots of the current environmental crisis lie within our contemporary conceptual milieu, which lauds and lionizes the human capacity to transform physical reality technologically in order to make it more conducive to human desires and ends, and sees non-human nature as having no other value beside its instrumental usefulness for humans. Consequently, it is argued, it is little wonder that we find ourselves presently confronted with an environmental crisis of such enormity and magnitude, as this formulation of the value of non-human nature gives incredible latitude to humans to utilize and exploit the non-human natural world in the service of their desires and projects, no matter how trivial or superficial these desires may be and regardless of their environmental impact and costs – the only restraint imposed on such exploitation being the limitations of our technical means and the ethical demand that the exploitation in question should not directly hinder human welfare. Yet, while this moral interdiction may be vigorous enough to prevent a wholesale global environmental catastrophe, it certainly does not appear to be robust enough to ground the continued existence of the wild non-human natural environment, as it is by no means certain that the disappearance of the wild world and of wild species would necessarily have a detrimental impact on human welfare. Thus modern environmentalism, in its efforts to argue for the preservation of the wild non-human natural world, has sought a ground for its evaluation besides its instrumentality for humans; and it is this endeavour that constitutes one of, if not the, central issues of environmental thought.
