{"id":13196,"date":"2023-05-04T01:19:03","date_gmt":"2023-05-03T15:19:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/?p=13196"},"modified":"2023-05-04T01:19:03","modified_gmt":"2023-05-03T15:19:03","slug":"why-earth-is-worth-protecting-and-not-just-for-our-sake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/2023\/05\/04\/why-earth-is-worth-protecting-and-not-just-for-our-sake\/","title":{"rendered":"Why Earth is worth protecting \u2013 and not just for our sake"},"content":{"rendered":"

Environmentalists rightly urge us to consider the long-term effects of our actions. Plastic bags, they point out, can take\u00a0hundreds of years<\/a>\u00a0to decompose, while radioactive waste can remain dangerous for\u00a0hundreds of thousands of years<\/a>. It could take the Earth\u2019s biosphere\u00a0several million years<\/a>\u00a0to recover from human-caused mass extinctions.<\/p>\n

As an environmental philosopher, I spend a lot of time thinking about facts such as these. This can be depressing. Still, looking very far into the future offers a glimmer of hope. After all, our waste will eventually decompose. The ecosystems we have degraded will eventually recover.<\/p>\n

To be sure, like all things, planet Earth will eventually meet its end,\u00a0engulfed, perhaps, by the expanding sun<\/a>. However, as comedian George Carlin\u00a0once said<\/a>, it will nonetheless \u201cbe here for a long, long, long time after we\u2019re gone and it will heal itself, it will cleanse itself, \u2018cause that\u2019s what it does\u201d.<\/p>\n

Only a few people, perhaps including\u00a0Donald Trump<\/a>, claim that this provides a reason to refrain from preserving biodiversity, reducing pollution or taking any other sort of environmental action. However, some think it tells us why such action is needed.<\/p>\n

For them, the fact that the planet will eventually recover tells us that when environmental action is needed, it\u2019s needed not for the planet\u2019s sake, but for ours \u2013 for the sake of us humans.<\/p>\n

Here\u2019s how Peter Kareiva, former chief scientist and vice president of NGO The Nature Conservancy, expresses\u00a0the point<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Almost no matter what we do, life will persist on Mother Earth \u2013 she is one tough lady. Even if there is a massive extinction, slowly the number of species will recover. So it is not Mother Earth that we should worry about. It is the quality of our own lives.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Satya Tripathi, secretary-general of the Global Alliance for a Sustainable Planet,\u00a0agrees<\/a>:<\/p>\n

We need to look at ourselves, be very selfish, stop making high-sounding claims that we are helping Mother Nature and the planet, [and] start telling that we are helping ourselves [\u2026] The planet does not need saving. Mother Nature was here billions of years ago, and she will be here after us.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The writer Frederick Lim takes\u00a0a similar line<\/a>:<\/p>\n

The planet does not need saving. Mitigating the impacts of climate change isn\u2019t for Earth\u2019s sake. Rather, it is for our own survival [\u2026] Even if we choose to neglect the climate emergency, and cause the Earth\u2019s environment to be inhabitable, planet Earth would still survive.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The argument implied by these claims runs as follows. Take some immense and near-invulnerable entity such as planet Earth or Mother Nature. That entity will eventually recover from whatever damage we humans do to it.<\/p>\n

So we don\u2019t need to engage in environmental action for the sake of anything as grand as planet Earth or Mother Nature. We need to do it for ourselves \u2013 for the sake of us humans.<\/p>\n

This is an argument for ‘anthropocentrism’: the view that the non-human world only has value because it serves human interests<\/a>. There are several things wrong with it. Here, though, let\u2019s consider just one.<\/p>\n

The anthropocentrists seem to assume that people can only ever take environmental action either for the sake of some gigantic entity such as planet Earth, or for the sake of human beings. So if we reject the first option, we must accept the second.<\/p>\n

That, however, is a false dilemma. Other options are available.<\/p>\n

Take\u00a0Bukit Barisan Selatan National Park<\/a>\u00a0in Sumatra, for example. The anthropocentrists quoted above would, I expect, acknowledge that that huge area of highly biodiverse tropical forest should continue to be protected.<\/p>\n

But they would add that it needn\u2019t be protected for the sake of the planet. Even if the forest is levelled and transformed into coffee plantations, the planet will be just fine. Ditto Mother Nature.<\/p>\n

They would add that Bukit Barisan Selatan should be protected for the sake of human beings \u2013 because it supplies certain people with vital material goods, for instance, or because it has\u00a0cultural value<\/a>\u00a0for them.<\/p>\n

But that is not the whole story. There is a third option \u2013 a third reason why the area should be protected.<\/p>\n

Consider the non-human animals for whom the place is home. Consider the dishevelled, bear-like binturong, or the slow loris, a fluffy, owl-eyed mammal with a toxic bite. Or take the Sumatran rhino, the Sumatran tiger or the Sumatran elephant. These animals are not just parts of planet Earth, Mother Nature or whatever. They are conscious individuals.<\/p>\n

And, as the philosopher\u00a0Martha Nussbaum<\/a>\u00a0and others have argued, they both deserve to flourish and need places in which they can flourish. So, although the forest really should be protected for our sakes, it should be protected for theirs too.<\/p>\n

The anthropocentrists are, therefore, partly right. The planet doesn\u2019t need saving. But acknowledging this does not mean we must be \u201cvery selfish\u201d and devote all our efforts to saving ourselves. There are other reasons to protect the strange, wonderful and partly non-human world we inhabit.<\/p>\n

This article was originally published in <\/strong><\/em>The Conversation<\/strong><\/a>.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n

Photo by NASA<\/a> on Unsplash.<\/strong><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Environmentalists rightly urge us to consider the long-term effects of our actions. Plastic bags, they point out, can take\u00a0hundreds of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":655,"featured_media":13200,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[63],"tags":[355,575,587],"coauthors":[588],"class_list":["post-13196","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-philosophy","tag-climate-change","tag-environment","tag-human-civilisation"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13196","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/655"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13196"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13196\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13202,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13196\/revisions\/13202"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/13200"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13196"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13196"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13196"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rationalemagazine.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=13196"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}