Introduction
People are often told to protect nature, even just circumventing a patch of grassland. They are implanted with this idea within their whole life path: children are edified by their parents and teachers; adults are stipulated by governments; and in turn, governments are evaluated by the public. If one asks them why they should protect nature, they often hold the sake for nature itself that they seem like moral saints; however, they fail to elaborate on their justification – they do not specify why protect for the reason of nature itself. Others’ justifications are more convincing and often encompass, unsurprisingly, the interaction between nature and humans instead of the intrinsic values of nature. The intentions of people protecting nature affluently vary, but ultimately originate from anthropocentric interests – especially realization to nature’s impact on human living and sense of self-acquisition.
Realization to Nature’s Impact on Human Living
A pivotal component on earth that comprises myriads of lives, nature imposes inevitable influences on human living. Millions of people die annually due to drastic natural disasters, while billions of people benefit from nature’s nurture. It is conspicuous that nature brings both happiness and pain. However, in a utilitarian calculation, even assuming everyone possesses equal interests, people still deduce to the conclusion that the happiness nature renders people overvalues the pain it renders, since many more people benefit than suffer from nature. Therefore, nature endows comprehensively positive influence upon human lives. Granted, governments have been taking action to improve environmental conditions and advocating for prescriptive treaties to garner global-scaled refinement all the times, especially after drastic changes of nature in which had engendered catastrophic degradation to people’s lives. During the First Industrial Revolution, countries dramatically increased their excavation of coal to match the rapidly growing demand, thereby causing huge air pollution. For example, he Great Smog event in 1952 in London was such a severe air pollution event that approximately 12,000 people died and 100,000 people were made ill in only 9 days.[i] It was not the publishment of the world’s first modern air pollution prevention law, the Clean Air Act in 1956 that was in effect for 37 years, until the outbreak of the Great Smog in London. The motive for British government was the devastating impact of air pollution to people’s life instead of the air pollution itself; it was unequivocal as Britain did not take practical actions to pragmatically reduce air pollution. Therefore, the threat of nature to human beings in turn spurs people to protect nature, which is in fact a means to protect themselves.
Besides governments’ policies to protect nature, companies aim at protection of nature through operating with as minimal impact on nature as possible. Companies spanning from clothing to foodservice advocate for recyclable products, in other words, products made from recycled materials. Part of the reasons is to reflect on governments’ policies, but they also emphasize the importance of conservation and sustainable practices. By reducing waste and minimizing the environmental impact of their operations, they not only maintain, or even wax, their revenues compared with those before their advocation for environmentally friendly products but also conserve resources for long-term sustainable development – less raw materials are required because of the recycling of products, and thus less input is needed. Another factor prompting companies to continue recyclable products attributes to consumers’ embrace of this attempt. The Circular Voice, Stena Recycling's survey investigated 5,000 consumers and discovered that a 66% majority believed that recycled materials are of the same quality; 76% consider it important, or very important, that manufacturers use recycled materials in their products; and 40% would even support a ban on products that can’t be recycled.[ii] In addition to the economic value of recyclable products, companies create aesthetic value by conserving natural resources. Imagine there is a virgin forest, the product of all the millions of years that have passed since the beginning of our plane, and one company owns it for its forestry center. Instead of cutting the forest down for short-term interests, the company preserves the forest by cutting only a few trees down per year, leaving the forest to rehabilitate itself and endowing future generations opportunities to appreciate wilderness as a ‘world heritage’ and continue the link to the past. “There are some things that, once lost, no amount of money can regain,” wrote Peter Singer in his Practical Ethics.[iii] The appreciation of history represented by the forest is exactly the thing that any amount of money cannot outweigh. The long-term benefits overshadow the short-term gains of economic growth, providing more people with more precious esthetic feelings. However, if future generations were unable to appreciate that aesthetic value, the company were to rather cut the forest down because the long-term benefits were to appear as nothing more important than the economic value of woods. Companies’ environmentally friendly schemes somehow aim at economic interests and aesthetic feelings.
Governments behold the detrimental effects of environmental disasters on people’s life while companies regard protection of nature as a long-term approach to sustainable development. Both of the factors advocate for and practice protection of nature from the interested interrelationship between nature and human – as their concession for human benefits.
Sense of Self-acquisition
People through protect nature for a sense of self-acquisition. People act upon their free will under the social contractions. With that in mind, ones complete an action for two ends: moral responsibility and survival necessity. People eat because they request nutrition from foods to survive; people fulfill in their roles in societies because they owe reciprocal relationships to societies and have to accomplish their moral duties in return to societies’ bounty. Since they have far realized the corollary importance of nature on people’s well-being, governments and organizations have been either promoting or implementing many new policies aimed at protection of nature. In addition to stipulative policies to reduce environmental pollution, they intend to arouse people’s subjective recognition of nature’s moral values through incredibly large amount of environmental propaganda to emphasize both the requisition and significance of protecting nature. Therefore, they often relate protection of nature to achieving moral values. Then United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon remarks on the moral dimensions of climate change and sustainable development in the Vatican City at 28 April, 2015. He asserted that because “we have a profound responsibility to protect the fragile web of life on this Earth, and to this generation and those that will follow,” protection of environment – or protection of nature, as “nature” encompasses the concept of “environment” – is an “urgent moral imperative and a sacred duty for all people of faith and all people of conscience.”[iv] In other words, Ban emphasized on people’s mora duty to protect nature for their responsibility to protect the disadvantaged and the vulnerable. Therefore, people feel morally demanding to protect nature and lean towards practice it in their life. Indeed, environmental propaganda and policies elevate people’s moral concern on nature, and thus people take steps to protect nature. A study about the effectiveness of environmental policies in China has revealed that green government publicity can lead to more environmental concerns and moral obligations, thereby facilitating people’s pro-environmental behaviors.[v] Had environmental policies not implemented, the only plausible motivation for people to protect nature is their acquisition of moral values.
Religious beliefs proffer people maxims to protect nature. Many religions elaborate the interaction between people and the world (nature) and appeal to people’s obligation to preserve the balance between people and the world. Buddhism conveys the values of conservation and responsibility for the future that sheds a light to today’s idea of sustainable development. For example, “As a bee – without harming the blossom, its color, its fragrance – takes its nectar and flies away: so should the sage go through a village.”[vi] The verse consolidates that people (the sage) should act like a bee: attain the appropriate amount of what they need with propriety to ensure their ephemeral acts would not affect future yields. The Dalai Lama, the foremost spiritual leader of the Gelug of Tibetan Buddhism, argues for the interdependence between the environments and people, asserting “Since I deeply believe that basically human beings are of a gentle nature so I think the human attitude towards our environment should be gentle.”[vii] Moreover, Islam also approaches environment from a stewardship perspective. It requires Muslims to devote themselves to follow the nature designed by Allah, and accordingly nature fashions human.[viii] With these in mind, the preservation of nature and symbiosis between nature and human become religious doctrines among many believers. They are justified to protect nature not necessarily for their understanding of the values of nature but somehow for their beliefs that their gods asked them to do so, and their gods must be right. By protecting nature, they fulfill the duties their worshiping gods ask; thereby, they conceive a sense of sacredness and self-accomplishment.
Nature renders people spiritually respectful for it through supporting their lives. Certain people hold certain spiritual beliefs, asserting they should protect nature for nature itself. Among them are indigenous people who exhibit exceeding enthusiasm in respect for nature. They regard nature as a person with a soul who proffer them everything they need to survive – an end in itself instead of a means to their ends. Thus, protection of nature, in their perspective, is protection of a person aside them, which means that their respect for nature ultimately descends on the fundamental that people respect themselves and oblige moral responsibilities upon personhood. That is, indigenous people’s spiritual belief, and therefore the protection of it, in nature derives from nature’s nurturing and the consensus to within-species protection. Furthermore, they could believe that nature has a soul, or consciousness, but it is difficult to indicate its authenticity. It is believed that human brain is the most complex system throughout human body; therefore, it is the most likely place to raise consciousness. However, nature, the composition of flowing water, sloping land, and etc., does not have human brain, nor any other complex system for consciousness to arise. Contrarily, if ones do not believe nature has consciousness, then you cannot believe nature has rights because rights derive from human's desire for the future. Therefore, these certain people’s spiritual beliefs for nature fail to stand as a valid justification to protect nature.
Criticism on Environmental Ethics
Many environmentalists stress an ethics extending to all living things and the intrinsic values of nature. However, many of them fail to make their arguments convincing. Probably the best-known defense to the ethics that ask people to extend their moral responsibilities to all living things is that of philosopher Albert Schweitzer. He argues that human is life which wills to live, and individual person exists in the midst of life which wills to live. The will-to-live is a yearning for more life; the exaltation of the will is called pleasure, and the degeneration of that will is called pain. He then calls on the necessity to practice the same reverence for life toward all will-to-live as toward his own. “It is good to maintain and cherish life; it is evil to destroy and to check life. A man is really ethical only when he obeys the constraint laid on him to help all life… To him life as such is sacred.” Peter Singer reprimands his ethics as misleading. Plants are not conscious and cannot engage in any intentional behaviors, and thereby they experience none of ‘yearning’, ‘exaltation’, ‘pleasure’ and ‘pain’. Therefore, people may say that plants do not will to live and it is of no need to extend moral circles to nature, or at least to plants.[ix] Similar assertions are evident in Kantian ethics. Immanuel Kant persists moral duties within the intelligent world of rational beings, since only rational beings can be law-giving and recipients of laws. As he wrote in Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, “Hence nothing other than the representation of the law in itself, which can of course occur only in a rational being… can constitute the preeminent good we call moral.”[x] Since animals are not self-conscious, they cannot qualify as self-determining agents, and hence cannot be ‘ends in themselves’, but only ‘a means to an end’.[xi] Kant’s assertion furthers the repudiation to Schweitzer’s “reference for life” ethics by corroborating that nature is not rational and does not have such will-to-life. Therefore, people do not need to extend their moral responsibilities to nature even though it comprises of myriads of living things.
Environmentalists fail to deduce the intrinsic values of nature. Aldo Leopold, a pioneer American ecologist, wrote that there was a need for land ethics, an “ethic dealing with man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it”. He synopsized his ethics as following: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” One tricky point is that the assertion deals with biotic community as a whole and does not empower each tiny component of the community. It thereby induces controversy that even according to the land ethics, there might be no intrinsic values in individual factors, because no individual is necessary for the survival of the ecosystem as a whole but the sum of many individuals. Moreover, the interrelation of all organisms does not necessarily reveal the intrinsic values of them; it may be interpreted that “they may be of worth only because they are needed for the existence of the whole, and the whole may be of worth only because it supports the existence of conscious beings.”[xii] Leopold argues we should have a genuine relationship with the environment – a relationship cannot exist without ‘love, respect, and admiration’ for the land.[xiii] It is indubitable that we own ethical relation to other people, but it is also true that we do not love and admiration for every member in societies and a high regard of their values. So, it is unnecessary to have a genuine relationship with the environment in order to own an ethical relation to the environment, but merely respect for the land, or a compulsory relationship by law (e.g., it is illegal to do whatever contradicts the conservation of the environment) could also ensure the conservation of the environment, similar to interindividual ethical relations guaranteed by laws. There are obviously other motives for people to still genuinely protect nature.
Conclusion
Protection of nature is a widely recognized deed that attains greater significance as environmental pollution has been degrading people’s well-being. Governments and organizations whatever domestic or international pays greater attention to it. Their dominant two means of persuading people involve glorifying the acts as moral achievement and underlining the impact of environmental disasters on people’s life. By instinct, people subconsciously regard protection of nature as a rewarding behavior as well as a remediation to procure future development. Indeed, to most cases, people should protect nature. However, sometimes people should not protect nature if protecting it yields more pain and less happiness, or not acting at perfect efficacy. Governments implement strict policies to protect Antarctica for the sake of its huge storage of fresh water and increasing greenhouse effect, limiting people’s access to it and utilization of the resources there. By contrast, Brazil government is acquiescent of local people to cut the trees in Brazilian rainforests, since no strict regulations are carried out. It is obvious that the rainforests are much closer to people’s life in terms of both distance and relevance than Antarctica, which is in reality far from inhabited area and has little impact to human interests. Therefore, Antarctica is having more attention than needed and the rainforest is underestimated. As recommendation, more protection should be enacted on the rainforest and less on Antarctica.
[i] Fuller, Gary (2018). "3: The Great Smog". The Invisible Killer: The Rising Global Threat of Air Pollution- and How We Can Fight Back. Melville House. pp. 43–44.
[ii] https://www.stenarecycling.com/news-insights/insights-inspiration/guides-articles/consumer-demand-recyclable-products/
[iii] Peter Singer. “The Environment”. Practical Ethics. Cambridge University Press third edition. pp. 242-245
[vi] Dhammapada IV, Pupphavagga: Blossoms, 49
[viii] Qur’an 30:30
[ix] Peter Singer. “The Environment”. Practical Ethics. Cambridge third edition. pp. 249-250
[x] Immanuel Kant. “From Common Rational Cognition to Philosophy”. Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. Cambridge University Press. p.14
[xi] John Cottingham. “Problems in Ethics”. Western Philosophy: An Anthology. Blackwell Publishing second edition. p. 577
[xii] Peter Singer. “The Environment”. Practical Ethics. Cambridge third edition. pp. 252-253
[xiii] John Cottingham. “Problems in Ethics”. Western Philosophy: An Anthology. Blackwell Publishing second edition. p. 585
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