Why Intrinsic Value? A Defence of Being Honest

For Wild Things for their Own Sake

As the recently appointed deputy director of The Rewilding Institute (TRI), one of my objectives is to ensure that TRI remains true to its founding mission of restoring and protecting wilderness and wildlife for their own sake. Sadly, recognition of the intrinsic value of wild Nature has become the exception rather than the norm in conservation – hence the publication of Dave Foreman’s Take Back Conservation, for one.

As a former philosopher of language who now sells my labour to moral philosophers, I am highly attuned to the framing of discourse and, specifically, to the implicit and explicit moral arguments (or the lack thereof) propounded by organisations and activists. This has distanced me from too many conservation organisations to count, and it was one of the main reasons – arguably the main reason – that I ultimately chose TRI as an outlet for my desire to confront today’s ecological crises in the company of fellow “Cannots” (to use Foreman’s Leopold-inspired term for those who cannot live without wild things). 

Stemming from the lineage of Wild Earth and its ethos of deep ecology and ecocentrism, TRI doesn’t hide the organisation’s commitment to wild Nature’s intrinsic value. The preamble to its vision statement, for example, begins, “The Rewilding Institute begins with the assumptions that most of the world ought to be wild, that extinction is the overarching crisis of our time, and that we modern humans have an ethical obligation to protect and restore wild Nature.” This sits in stark contrast to the many, many conservation organisations that justify their work in terms of human dependence on the “natural resources” and “ecosystem services” derived from Nature.

Contrast TRI’s stated aims, for example, even to the rhetoric deployed by the congenial Half-Earth Project: “The ongoing mass extinction of the natural world ranks with pandemics, world war, and climate change as among the greatest threats that humanity has imposed on itself. To lose so much of Earth’s biodiversity is to both destroy our living heritage, and to risk the stability of the planet, today and for all future generations.” 

If one’s ultimate objective is the preservation of most of the world as wild, why choose to throw one’s weight behind TRI rather than Half-Earth? Well, to speak for myself, my favouritism for TRI owes much to TRI’s upfront, non-nonsense commitment to Nature’s intrinsic value. Our objective should be to conserve wild Nature, period, not to conserve wild Nature in order thereby to save humanity from ourselves. 

In this post, I offer a straightforward defence of framing our demands for conservation and rewilding in terms of an ecocentric worldview that recognises Nature’s intrinsic value. It goes something like this: All else equal, we should be honest (§1). One might suggest that we have practical reason to be dishonest (i.e. attempt to appeal to anthropocentrists) in order to protect wild Nature (§2); however, this potential counterargument doesn’t hold water (§§3-4). Thus, we’re back to the starting point that we ought simply to be honest. Imagine that!

1. Why Intrinsic Value?! Why Honesty? Why Morality?

Sometimes conservationists pose a question that I find frankly bizarre: “Should the demand for conservation be framed in terms of anthropocentric values or ecocentric values?”

Such questions always strike me as putting the cart before the horse. Unless there are extenuating factors that make it morally appropriate to lie (a possibility I’ll consider in §2), the demand for conservation ought to be framed in terms of whatever is true. That is, instead of asking “What should conservationists say is true?” we should simply ask “What is true?” – and then we should say that. Does wild Nature have its own inherent value that’s independent of its value to humans? Well, it does or it doesn’t, and this should determine how conservationists should frame their rhetoric and demands. If anthropocentrism is true, the demands of conservation should be framed in terms of Nature’s value to people; if ecocentrism is true, the demands of conservation should be framed in terms of Nature’s inherent value. It is a simple matter of honesty and truthfulness. 

For my own part, I accept ecocentrism (even though I have argued that ecocentrism per se is under-described for the purpose of guiding conservation). In fact, I find the truth of anthropocentrism a very strange prospect indeed, given that Homo sapiens has only lived on this Earth for 300,000 years; it is ludicrous to think that there was no value in all the biodiverse and ecological complex lost worlds that came and passed in the hundreds of millions of years before our own species arrived on the scene. They had value, surely, and they would have had value even if H. sapiens had never evolved at all. Thus, I believe that it’s important for conservationists to accept and assert that wild Nature is intrinsically valuable for this reason alone: wild Nature is intrinsically valuable, and it is best (all else equal) to believe and promote truths and to abstain from believing or disseminating falsehoods. Moreover, I believe that it’s important for me personally to openly acknowledge that wild Nature is intrinsically valuable, because that’s what I believe, and people ought to be sincere.

As Chelsea Batavia and Michael Paul Nelson have pointed out, intrinsic value is itself intrinsically valuable and needs no further justification: “We find it troubling that [intrinsic value (IV)] has been so casually demoted in the conservation discourse, especially on (usually unsubstantiated) grounds of its ineffectiveness. This is a sad and perversely ironic mishandling of IV specifically, and morality generally. Recognizing IV, and demonstrating due favor or respect for its bearers, justify themselves […], whether or not they ‘work’ to forward some other agenda. As such, we suggest conservationists ought to acknowledge and promote nonhuman IV where there is good reason to believe it exists – simply because it is the right thing to do” (2017, “For goodness sake! What is intrinsic value and why should we care?” Biological Conservation). 

Nature has intrinsic value. It is also inherently good to be honest, sincere, and to hold and act on correct moral principles. One might think this would be the end of the discussion. Oddly, however, proponents of ecocentrism sometimes seem to feel the need to justify their avowals of ecocentrism in practical terms. Even the closing of The Ecological Citizen’s Statement of Commitment to Ecocentrism reads “We, the undersigned, are convinced that the future of our living planet is dependent upon the recognition of the intrinsic value of nature, and strong support for ecocentrism as a worldview.” The claim here, significantly, is not “We support ecocentrism, period (because it is true),” but “We support ecocentrism because it is instrumentally valuable for preserving the future of the living planet.” I am among the undersigned, yet this closing sentence has always galled me. Note that, arguably (unless recognition is assumed to be factive), a person could consent to that sentence even if they themselves do not accept ecocentrism, provided that they believe that there is practical benefit in “making as if” nature has intrinsic value to help to secure the future of living planet and thus humanity. 

Other prominent ecocentrists have also argued for acceptance or promotion of ecocentrism on the basis of its instrumental value for obtaining certain desired conservation outcomes (see, for example, Taylor et al, 2020, “The need for ecocentrism in biodiversity conservation,” Conservation Biology). Although well-intended, such arguments can be morally suspect as they are presented – if not due to diminishing the value of wild Nature, then due to diminishing the value of truthfulness, honesty, and sincerity. Is personal integrity and steadfastness in one’s fundamental moral convictions not still a good thing? Is that itself not something worth defending amidst this quagmire of sales and marketing, public relations, and politics?

In the above portrayals of the value of ecocentrism, it is presupposed that the protection of nature/biodiversity is a desirable outcome, and it is argued that the adoption of ecocentric ethics is an pragmatically effective way to achieve this outcome. But one can then ask on what moral basis the protection of nature/biodiversity is good. If it is good for ecocentric reasons, then the entire argument seems trivial; of course the goal of ethics education is to promote behaviour that complies with that ethical system. On the other hand, if the protection of nature/biodiversity is assumed to be good for anthropocentric reasons, then the argument contravenes its own premise – implicitly assuming anthropocentrism to argue for the (postured?) acceptance of non-anthropocentrism.  

2. Lying for the Sake of Wild Things? 

It is a widely held position that it’s better to assert truths than falsehoods, all else being equal. On this basis, we ought to speak from the standpoint of ecocentrism rather than anthropocentrism if the former is correct. Sometimes, however, all else is not equal. Suppose the Nazi Gazpacho (to take an example Marjorie Taylor Greene) arrive at the door and ask whether any Jews are taking refuge in your house. Suppose there are. Do you tell the truth – or do you lie in the hope of saving lives? Or suppose you are a spy or a plain clothes officer. Do you tell the truth about your identity when your job itself requires you to dissemble? (Or, to quote George W Bush this time, to “disassemble; that means not telling the truth.”) Or suppose your partner asks you “Do I look fat in this?” 

Honesty is the moral default, while concealment or confabulation stands in need of special justification. This is not to say, however, that no such justification can ever be given. The question at hand, then, is this: Do we have a compelling moral reason to lie about the truth of ecocentrism and the falsity of anthropocentrism? 

There is one obvious candidate for such a rationale: “The bulk of humanity continues to persist under the delusion of anthropocentrism. Meanwhile, time is of the essence to save Earth’s wild places and species, and we cannot spare the time to attempt to convert the masses to ecocentrism (if that is even possible at all) before persuading them to take action; we must attempt to meet them where they are. Thus, for the sake of wild Nature itself, we need to conceal our commitment to wild Nature’s intrinsic value, and talk as though Nature’s benefits to people are what’s important.”  

Although this line of reason does hold some superficial plausibility, it has never deterred me from sticking to my guns on ecocentrism and my expressed commitment thereto. Perhaps there are specific circumstances (such as, say, saving a critically endangered species) that justify acting pragmatically in whatever way seems most effective,  even if it requires concealing one’s own moral principles and making shit up about why humanity will benefit if (for example) the critically endangered species is able to persevere. But let’s take these on a case by case basis as they arise. As a general matter, I am not dissuaded from speaking what I believe.

3. Nature Has Time, Even if We Don’t 

For one, precisely because I’m an ecocentrist, I’m actually not in a frenzy over the prospect of running out of time – for the question is not how long do we have, but how long does wild Nature have, and that’s something on the order of 600 million years to 1500 million years before the expanding sun vapourises the Earth’s waters (see Kollipara, 2014, “Earth Won’t Die as Soon as Thought,” Science, although I guess that study’s getting a bit dated; better subtract 9 years from the endpoints of that range estimate). Furthermore, although a mass extinction is indeed underway, Earth can recover from mass extinctions in only 10 million years (see, e.g., Lowery and Fraass, 2019, “Morphospace expansion paces taxonomic diversification after end Cretaceous mass extinction,” Nature Ecology & Evolution). In the words of Thích Nhất Hạnh, “The Earth may need millions of years to heal, to retrieve her balance, and restore her beauty. She will be able to recover, but we humans and other species will disappear, until the Earth can generate conditions to bring us forth again in new forms” (“Falling in Love with the Earth”).  

I will, of course, continue to defend wild Nature in the here and now; I can’t help it, for it is like defending the honour of a close friend or loved one. But the fact that I’ve committed to this enterprise for wild Nature itself – rather than my own selfish desire to be able to experience it for the rest of my own life – provides some breathing room. The Earth can heal given time. For those of us who cherish wild Nature, it is almost impossible not to experience fear and anxiety at the present rates of catastrophic destruction. However, I don’t believe this fear alone should compel us to subvert our own beliefs and attempt to tell people what we think might have some slim chance of persuading them. We should do what we can in our lifetimes to restore and liberate wild Nature heal, but we must also maintain faith in Nature’s long-term resilience, and not let eco-anxiety drive us into such a disarray that we grasp at straws in the hopes of motivating others, while losing the grip on our own core moral beliefs.  

4. Anthropocentrism Won’t Save Wild Nature Anyway

Acceptance of Nature’s resilience, and our own impermanence, is a moderating factor that should lessen the felt need to “lie” for wild Nature’s behalf. But there is an even deeper reason that there’s no need for us to dissemble in the attempt to persuade human chauvinists of anthropocentric reasons to protect wildlands and wildeors: it won’t work. 

Lying about anthropocentrism can’t be expected to help us to protect wild Nature – or, at least, not much of it. There’s no reason whatsoever to think that appealing to the material self-interest of humans could suffice to protect Earth’s imperilled biodiversity and remaining wild places – let alone motivate the restoration and protection of half of the planet for autonomously unfolding ecological and evolutionary processes. After all, most Americans seem to be getting on fine without the passenger pigeon, ivory-billed woodpecker, Carolina parakeet, and numerous other creatures driven to extinction by our pursuit of progress. We are getting on fine despite the loss of one-third the world’s forests and nearly 90 percent of its wetlands to our expansionism, and we might get on just fine if the last remnants of wild Nature are given over to agriculture, wind farms, lithium mines, data centres, golf courses, car parks for our EVs, and other human uses. As Brad Meiklejohn recently wrote in a contribution to Rewilding Earth, “Most of the species on the planet are superfluous to human needs; people can thrive with only a few key ingredients like corn, rice, and cows” (“Boiling Frogs”), and as Howie Wolke previously pointed out, “Like cockroaches, humans can adapt to and even thrive in nearly every artificial environment imaginable. Mumbai, for example. Or Houston. Or the expansive monocultural wastelands of Kansas” (“Thirty By Thirty and Half Earth: Promises and Pitfalls”). 

John Vucetich, Jeremy Bruskotter, and Michael Nelson have addressed an array of (bad) arguments against appeal to intrinsic value in conservation, including the highly implausible claim that anthropocentrism should suffice for motivating conservation action, thus rendering appeal to intrinsic value unnecessary. On this point, they write, “Most rare species provide negligible or dubious benefit to human welfare because they are rare. Other objects of conservation concern may once have contributed substantially to human welfare (e.g., American chestnut [Castanea dentata]) but no longer do because their abundance is low. […] Finally,many objects of conservation concern could be valued because they might serve human welfare in some as yet unknown capacity. But that seems a weak rationale for conservation. The uncertain and unlikely value of many species to human welfare would almost certainly be outweighed by the utility of exploiting habitats upon which those species depend” (2015, “Evaluating whether nature’s intrinsic value is an axiom of or anathema to conservation,” Conservation Biology).

Although I dislike arguments based on the “instrumental value of intrinsic value” in conservation, such arguments do have a role in countering the potential objection that the urgent need to protect Nature gives us reason to lie about moral truths. In sum, it would be pointless to “lie” and endorse anthropocentrism for the sake of trying to save wild Nature, because anthropocentrism can’t be expected to get us – or, more importantly, Nature – very far towards that end anyway. Oh, sure, we “Cannots” are personally burdened with considerable grief at the losses, yet those of our preferences have always found ourselves at the losing end of so-called progress.

There is also practical value in being forthright about our commitment to Nature’s intrinsic value: it can help us stand firm in defence of wild places in face of the pressure to compromise. As Howie Wolke wrote in another Rewilding Earth contribution, speaking of wilderness protection, “It also requires the strength of character to avoid beginning a process by compromising with opponents, and by fighting for every possible acre thereafter as the process proceeds. This requires leadership that loves and values wilderness as the highest expression of human selflessness: a biocentric view that recognizes the intrinsic value of all wild places and creatures” (2021, “We Need Big Holistic Wilderness”). (See also George Wuerthner’s article “Collaboration Traps,” which addresses the importance of not compromising in the defence of the intrinsic value of wildlands.)

So, then, there’s no good reason – generally speaking – to subvert our ecocentric convictions for the (alleged) sake of convincing others to protect wild Nature. On the contrary, there’s good reason not to do so. It seems the virtue of honesty wins after all.

5. Rewilding for Its Own Sake

There is sometimes temptation to instrumentalise the value of rewilding – to present rewilding as something that is important because, for example, it is an effective means to combat biodiversity loss and climate change. This is a milquetoast defence of rewilding, forgoing an opportunity to articulate the moral mandate to respect wild Nature’s autonomy, caving instead to the reiteration of socially acceptable outcomes. Nothing is more politically correct in environmental discourse than to cite climate change mitigation as the overriding objective, and it is also popularly acceptable to speak of the extinction crisis as something bad that ought to be avoided.  

The fundamental moral justification of rewilding is not to mitigate climate change or even (merely) to avert loss of biodiversity (although the latter was, of course, a major concern of all of the movement’s founders). Like many rewilders within the classic North American tradition, I believe that intrinsic value in Nature inheres not only in wild creatures, biodiversity, and intact ecosystems, but also in those natural processes that have shaped all of life as we know it (as well as all of the life we never knew, and all future life that we won’t). Rewilding is its own end: the liberation and protection of vast expanses of land and sea where ecological and evolutionary processes can carry on as they will, according to their own arational creative powers, untrammelled by human interference. 

The same reasons given in §1 for vouching for the intrinsic value of Nature also apply to this special case. There are also no compelling countervailing reasons to lie. On the contrary, it is not only dishonest but also dangerous to attempt to instrumentalise the value of rewilding and downplay the role of the basic moral obligation to respect Nature’s potential for autonomy. If rewilding is only a means to protect biodiversity and mitigate climate change, then why should rewilding be pursued if these outcomes can be achieved while humans continue to domesticate and manage the planet? As I have previously argued, it is precisely this sort of instrumentalisation of rewilding that has opened to the door for the alleged synthesis of rewilding and agriculture, a seemingly oxymoronic concept that’s actually being promoted in the UK by Virginia Thomas and others (see my “A Follow-Up Regarding So-Called ‘Agricultural Rewilding’”).  

Promoting the goal of “rewilding for its own sake” will not be politically correct. Hell, it is not politically correct to use the word ‘wilderness’ – let alone to accept the coherence of the concept and even advocate for its continued existence over large portions of the Earth. It is not politically correct to accept that the concept of Nature’s autonomy is not only coherent but also has moral relevance. It’s not politically correct to vouch for anything that entails that large parts of Earth’s surface must be kept off-limits to human habitation and exploitation. In the milieu of leftist academia and “woke” political advocacy, a voice for the wilderness is ipso facto a voice in the wilderness. And that’s all the more reason that The Rewilding Institute must support the goal of protecting self-willed natural processes for their own sake – and must do so vocally. 

When conservationists feel the pressure to remain politically correct, there are perverse consequences that are bad for Nature (and, yes, bad for people too), as it is most salient in the case of overpopulation denialism. How can anyone deny the reality of human overpopulation? The statistics make it undeniable. (Or, as Meiklejohn writes in the “Boiling Frogs” article, “If you think that overpopulation is not a problem, you need to get out more.”) As far as I call figure it out, people deny overpopulation for one main reason: they don’t want to be called racists, misanthropes, and ecofascists. Organisations like The Rewilding Institute need to stand firm on our politically incorrect convictions – in part that we might serve as a beacon for others to garner the courage to assert unpopular-but-bloody-obvious truths: human overshoot is rapidly diminishing self-willed Nature, and this in itself is very bad indeed.

TRI has not always been immune from the pressure to depict rewilding as an pragmatic solution to the commonly accepted crisis of climate change and biodiversity collapse. As deputy director, one of my charges and objectives is to ensure that the organisation resists this, always foregrounding the fact that wild Nature is good in itself and, correspondingly, that human domination and overshoot is bad in itself. Climate change and biodiversity loss are symptoms, but subjugation of self-willed Nature is the fundamental moral ill. And to speak this truth is a matter of honesty and integrity.

A Role for Anti-Paternalism in Ecological Ethics?

Seatbelt laws are often considered examples of paternalism. But it is a matter of justification. Maybe seatbelt laws exist to protect others from ejected bodies.

Paternalism is a personal bête noire. It is also a topic that has received little attention in ecological ethics, despite some modicum of discussion of the moral relevance of nature’s autonomy. I have mentioned paternalism in passing on multiple occasions; it even got a subsection heading in my last post. But I decided it deserves its own post.  

As a disclaimer, this post mostly just recycles a lot of my now-familiar content on the philosophy of rewilding; it’s just the overall frame of anti-paternalism that’s new in this one.

A Post About Paternalism

As a woman who chooses to live alone, travel alone, hike alone, swim alone, go out at night alone, etc., paternalism is a topic frequently on my mind. Individuals ranging from my literal “pater” to strangers in foreign lands “worry about me” due to my solitary tendencies, whether out of concern for my physical safety or the projected (and false) assumption that I must be lonesome. Never mind that this lifestyle is my firm choice, as it has been for over two decades as an independent adult. To me, living alone is the cornerstone of freedom, spontaneity, and peace of mind; I would have it no other way. Yet I am sometimes plagued by a sense of relentless scrutiny from those who condescendingly presume that it would be better for my sake to relinquish this freedom, on account of their own conceptions of the kind of safety, security, and companionship a woman ought to have. I am thus frequently reminded that paternalism is an affront to personal autonomy and dignity. 

I also think a lot about ecological ethics. Lately, one of my main interests has been the idea of respect for autonomy of wild nature (specifically, under my own account, respect for autonomy of evolutionary processes). It seems to me that paternalism is an under-explored topic in environmental ethics, even internal to discussions of nature’s autonomy. The topic receives no treatment, for example, in the volume Recognizing the Autonomy of Nature: Theory and Practice (ed. Thomas Heyd). (The only indexed reference to “paternalism” occurs in Andrew Light’s criticism of Eric Katz’s radically anti-interventionist position, but this is merely a passing comment, without analysis of what paternalism is or is not in the context of restoration.)

Call it projection, if you like, but this strikes me as a significant omission. Paternalism might be salient to me because of my personal loathing thereof, but I’m not the first to link the concept of “respect for autonomy” to our moral responsibilities toward wild nature, and I’m certainly not the first to make a connection between anti-paternalism and our moral responsibility to respect others’ autonomy. By transitivity, there’s at least a prima facie reason to introduce the concept of paternalism into our conversations about what we owe to wild nature. 

As with the broader notion of autonomy, most philosophical thought about paternalism does not translate straightforwardly outside of the domain of persons. It must remain, to large extent, more of a guiding metaphor. What the exercise can do, however, is help us focus on our thoughts as (ecocentric) conservationists on the question “What is Nature’s will?” as opposed to an exclusive or dominant focus on human-contrived measures of ecological health.

Yes, “in the real world” (as reproaches to philosophers often begin), it’s anthropocentrism that’s the biggest threat to the integrity of conservation efforts – not paternalistic versions of ecocentrism or biocentrism. However, effectively countering anthropocentric worldviews requires more than decrying anthropocentrism; we should be able to offer a coherent alternative. As I argued in “Ecocentrism Is Underspecified,” ecocentrism as such is insufficiently precise to provide a moral basis for practical conservation action. While we do need to admit that ecological systems and processes have moral standing, we require a more precise starting point to direct our goals as conservationists. In that post, I ultimately emphasised the intrinsic “goodness” of evolutionary processes (a la Michael Soulé) and the hypothesis that, fully cashed out, recognition of this “goodness” must include a cluster of action-influencing non-cognitive sentiments like humility, wonder, and awe. Although the way, I also broached the idea of anti-paternalism. It occurs to me that, even considered on its own, anti-paternalism provides an provocation in the direction of abstaining from intervention in natural processes, except where the intervention is plausibly construed as removing constraints on their self-determined action. It is the reason for an act, not the act itself, that determines whether a given act is paternalistic. Anti-paternalism will not provide us with a checklist of interventions we should and should not make. It is a way to hone our goals and motives, to rethink what we’re doing.

1. Acting On Nature’s Behalf 

The philosopher Eric Katz endorses a non-interventionist position that is extreme even by my lights. In essence, he rejects restoration outright. One of Katz’s central claims is that restoration is always covertly anthropocentric: “the imposition of human intention and design on natural processes.” Using the example of wolf reintroduction, he states:

“​​What might appear as a restored or recreated natural system is, in fact, a human-produced system designed to satisfy human needs and wants. So, I argue that one critical response to the process of ecological restoration is that it results in a thoroughgoing anthropocentrism — the system is created to fulfill human satisfactions. (In the spectrum of wolf cases noted above the desire is for a return to an older ecosystem that has a flourishing wolf population. Even though the individual wolves and the ecosystem as a whole benefit from the restoration, the intervention was undertaken for the fulfillment of a human-directed purpose.)” [*]

However, it seems that Katz is straightforwardly wrong to claim that the reason for restoration, including species reintroductions, is necessarily conducted to “satisfy human wants and desires.” It appears obvious that people can undertake restoration for nature’s own benefit. To continue with Katz’s example, the extirpation the grey wolf and other top predators in the United States has led to trophic imbalance and cascading ecological consequences, as Aldo Leopold poignantly described in “Thinking like a Mountain” – which, significantly, he chose to title “Thinking like a Mountain” instead of “Thinking like a Human.” Leopold’s essay is widely accepted as a canonical work in ecocentric moral thought, which dictates us to consider ecosystems as wholes as moral subjects. There seems to be no reason to deny that humans can support wolf reintroduction for the sake of its benefit to the ecosystem as a whole – “thinking like a mountain” – rather than a human desire “for a return to an older ecosystem.” 

Consider additionally that conservationists often engage in restoration projects, such as the creation of “future old growth forests” (as I heard some conservationists say on some video once), whose full results won’t manifest for hundreds of years. Some might engage in such work for the benefit of future human generations, but there seems to be no reason to deny that others are sincerely motivated by the future benefits to nature itself, or to non-human residents of future habitats (especially when childless misanthropes like the author participate in or support long-range restoration work). Indeed, it’s coherent to engage in restoration work even if one believes that the human race will soon be damned. As some readers might already know, I’m very fond of this quotation from Dave Foreman (Rewilding Earth Podcast Episode 1): “I don’t know if Homo sapiens is going to exist in a hundred years the way we’re doing. But what my goal really is, is to have all the building blocks of evolution — which are native species, natural processes, large chunks of land and oceans and lakes and rivers that are off limits to industrial civilization — for whatever comes next.” If we’re capable of engaging in restoration and rewilding for this reason — and surely we, like Foreman, are — then it seems absurd to insist that all work in ecological restoration is done to “to fulfil human satisfactions.”

[*] These specific quotes come from Katz, E, 2018, “Replacement and Irreversibility: The Problem with Ecological Restoration as Moral Repair,” Ethics & the Environment 23(1); pp. 22-24.   

2. The Paternalism Worry 

I submit, contra Katz, that people can engage in ecological restoration for non-anthropocentric reasons, acting for nature’s own behalf. I could say more to argue for this, but I bet that few readers were persuaded by Katz at the outset, and so really I’ve probably already said more than necessary. One complication, however, is that “acting on nature’s behalf” does appear to involve an imposition of our own ideas or assumptions about what is best for nature (although I will question this later). Thus, although it seems we can sincerely act on nature’s behalf, there remains a worry that our doing so is inherently paternalistic, especially when we note that nature cannot communicate its will or consent to any intervention that we might propose.

As defined by the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, paternalism “is the interference of a state or an individual with another person, against their will, and defended or motivated by a claim that the person interfered with will be better off or protected from harm.” Paternalism is generally considered an offence against personal autonomy, for it involves judging that the subject of the intervention is either unable to discern her own best interest or unable or unwilling to pursue it for herself. If we take seriously that there is a moral mandate to respect nature’s autonomy, as I believe we should (see §5 or most things I’ve written recently), then we should also take seriously the ostensible corollary that we ought to avoid paternalism when intervening on nature’s behalf.

But it is not straightforward to determine what constitutes paternalism in conservation and restoration. Clearly not all intervention on a person’s behalf is paternalistic, even when it infringes on that person’s freedom in some way. People allow bankers to lock away their money in “Christmas savings accounts” to keep them from spending it, (sometimes) follow the advice of doctors on restrictions on their activities after a medical procedure, and ask friends to keep them responsible in avoiding falling back into bad habits. In the human domain, there’s a nifty test that can reasonably assure us that an act of intervention N on behalf of some subject S was not paternalistic: did S request or at least consent to N? If so, then it seems that N was S’s will, not paternalistic imposition. The problem with wild nature is that it cannot communicate its desires – and not because nature is impaired, incapacitated, or deficient in any way that undercuts its status as a competent “agent” fully capable of autonomous activity. The difficulty is simply that wild nature has neither desires nor the ability to communicate in any literal sense. 

At this point, it might seem that all intervention is bound to be paternalistic, for we know these two things: (1) nature can’t give consent; (2) nature can recover without us. Throughout the history of complex life, nature has recovered – and recovered quite well – from five mass extinctions. It is its own sort of hubris to assume that humans hold the power to f–k things up so badly that nature will be unable to recover. If our actions lead to our own species’ demise (which seems to be the path on which we’re heading), then sooner or later nature will be released from human pressure; when this is so, nature will be able to recover, at least in the space of millions of years, as surely as nature recovered after the Great Dying 252 million years ago, and as surely as nature recovered after the K-T impact event – er, well, maybe that one didn’t turn out so well with the rise of mammals in the absence of the non-avian dinosaurs… In any case, we can’t get nature’s consent for any restoration activity, and we have good reason to believe that nature doesn’t need us to intervene in any way in order to thrive on its own terms, eventually, in its own long time scales. This conjunction might lead us to conclude that if we want to avoid paternalism, we should err on the side of caution and never engage in any type of active restoration work.

Such a conclusion, however, would be much too hasty. In some cases, there can be little doubt about the manner in which humans have disrupted the processes of self-willed nature, and thus little doubt that reversing this damage promotes the “will” of self-willed nature. The most obvious examples here involve the fragmentation and pollution of landscapes due to manufactured artefacts. There’s little doubt that we impede the autonomous flow of natural processes when we build a road, dam a river, erect fencing, install artificial night lighting, or operate noisy vehicles or machinery. Correspondingly, when we remove man-made barriers or eliminate sources of light and noise pollution, it’d be counterintuitive, to say the least, to conclude that our actions are paternalistically constraining natural processes. On the contrary, it seems that we are releasing natural processes from artificial constraints. 

What about the reintroduction of extirpated species? Or the expiration of introduced, invasive species? These are other cases, of course, in which human intrusion disrupted the naturally flowing processes of self-regulating ecosystems – often to the detriment of native biodiversity and species richness. A complication, however, is that ecosystems inevitably continue to adapt and adjust. When we restore extirpated species, the environment into which they are reintroduced will be an altered one – the more time has passed since the extirpation, the more changed. Given enough time, and given freedom from our meddling, nature will produce new fecund and biodiverse ecosystems, even though the species composition will be altered from what it was prior to anthropogenic disruption. Should we nonetheless attempt to reset the clock to an earlier state of affairs by restoring species we extinguished or removing those we introduced? The question for anti-paternalist restorationists, I submit, is whether these interventions are also best conceived as releasing nature from human-imposed constraints – that is, liberating nature to be able to continue to pursue the self-directed course it had established prior to the imposition – or whether they are more accurately viewed as pre-empting nature’s own self-directed course of recovery from a past harm

In the latter case, the intervention would indeed seem paternalistic: nature is capable of self-healing, and if we intervene inappropriately, we risk disrespecting this. But there is no reason to think all reintroductions are paternalistic, especially when the extirpation occurred recently enough that it is reasonable to assume that few changes in the ecosystem have occurred (except, perhaps, those wrought by the extirpation itself). In this case, it seems to me that we’re merely giving back to nature something that we took away – something that belongs to it – without otherwise imposing upon nature’s self-direction. In the US, the reintroduction of recently extirpated predators like wolves and cougars seems readily construed as such. On the other hand, there’s no reason to assume that no reintroductions are paternalistic. The potential for paternalism seems especially relevant when long amounts of time have passed, as I have mentioned in previous critiques of the aspirations of Pleistocene rewilding. There are two notable differences here: (1) the more time has time passed, the farther along nature will have progressed in its own process of self-healing; (2) in Pleistocene rewilding, the extirpated fauna are typically globally extinct, and we can’t return exactly what we took away.

It’s not my purpose here to provide a metric to decide every case, if that were even possible. Moreover, our initial intuitions about even the preceding cases might differ. My present interest is merely to formulate the proper question to ask – or something reasonably close to it – to help us shape our goals and intentions, and thereupon seek the answers that we need. Nature cannot communicate its “will” to us. However, we can look to historical baselines to determine what self-willed nature was in fact doing prior to human disturbance. We can look to similar comparison sites in which human meddling has been less. We can pay attention to the courses that nature tends to follow when anthropogenic pressures are absent or removed.

I suggest that we equate nature’s “will,” roughly, with whatever nature would have kept on doing had humans not deliberately intervened in the first place. Since change happens without us, this is not necessarily the same as the baseline prior to human interference. However, in cases of recent baselines, little might have changed save for effects of our impositions, and thus restoration can reasonably be construed as enabling nature to reassert its own will. (Granted, the inevitability of continued anthropogenic climate change poses additional complications, for we can predict that even recent historical baselines won’t be fully reliable guides for long, and that nature will need additional space to adapt; species will need room to extend their ranges inland, or to higher elevations, or northward or southward, etc. If our focus is on creating space in which nature can make its own “decisions” in response to climate change, this does not seem paternalistic; it is merely a side note.) 

At the other extreme, there are interventions that produce states that we know nature would not have devised on its own, such as restoration involving the translocation of non-native species to serve as functional “proxies” for extirpated species, or the intentional planting of non-native trees that are anticipated to be more resilient to climate change (or planting monoculture tree plantations and calling it “reforestation”). Like most conservation efforts, the construction of non-natural species assemblages is sometimes justified in terms of “ecosystem services” provided to hoomans. But if such actions are undertaken on nature’s own behalf, then they raise concerns related to paternalism. Is it really respectful to self-willed nature to sever evolutionary chains millions of years old …because we don’t trust nature’s own ability to recover without our transplant surgery? …because we think nature needs to be forced into speeding up its recovery? This is also a concern I’ve previously broached in the context of Pleistocene rewilding (and which I’ll revisit briefly in §4).

3. Nature’s Will versus Nature’s Health

As a response to the paternalism worry, the focus on the question “What is Nature’s will?” is perhaps best understood as an alternative to an emphasis on putatively objective standards of nature’s health or welfare (with various notions of biodiversity being the most notable). 

A tell-tale sign of paternalism is the assumption that some externally-imposed standard of health or welfare overrides an individual’s own judgement in deciding what is important for herself, which is followed by the coercion of that individual to do what is best according to that standard rather than according to her own will. Often, we do care about health, and sometimes we even defer to what the experts tell us to do. But there are limits. None of us, I presume, would tolerate state-imposed mandates to force our eating, drinking, exercising, or sleeping habits to fall perfectly in line with the leading recommendations of the health community. Most of us are knowingly and willfully imperfect in our habits – and we wouldn’t have it otherwise. And consider further that externally-imposed standards of “health” sometimes pathologise what shouldn’t be pathologised in the first place. Homosexuality was classified as a mental disorder until the 1970s. Today, the neurodiversity movement challenges the pathologisation of autism, ADHD, and other conditions. It would be paternalistic to force “treatment” on neurodivergent individuals who believe that they have no condition that needs to be cured. 

As in the above examples, the imposition of external standards of health can in itself be paternalistic and fail to respect individual dignity. I might also here return here to my leading example. A much-cited 2015 study found that living alone was associated with a 32 percent increased likelihood of mortality (“Loneliness and Social Isolation as Risk Factors for Mortality”). Admittedly, it is a bit difficult for me to imagine that I wouldn’t die prematurely from some stress-related illness if I was forced to cohabitate – assuming that I didn’t die prematurely due to having had enough and going and jumping off a cliff. But suppose for the sake of argument that I would live a longer life if cohabitating. Even if that were the case, I would not choose that longer life for myself, because I judge my freedom and solitude to be more important; it sounds like a long life of misery. If anyone were to attempt to coerce me into cohabitate so that I would “enjoy” a longer and healthier life, I’d be f–ing pissed at that person for disrespecting my own decisions and lifestyle preferences.

In “Ecocentrism Is Underspecified,” I discussed an argument due to philosophers Karim Jebari and·Anders Sandberg that ecocentrists ought to endorse geoengineering as a means to extend the lifespan of a habitable biosphere on Earth. Many might find the idea of such planetary technologies to be grossly hubristic – life-extending or not – as I did when I first read it. On reflection, though, paternalism might be an even deeper ill: to endorse geoengineering as a means to biospheric life-extension is to force the planet into compliance with the assumption that a longer life is better than a free and self-directed one. I adamantly disagree with this assumption as applied to my own life, and I am sure that many other people would not want it imposed upon them either. Why, then, suggest that we force it upon Earth?  

The publication of Jebari and Sandberg’s article was one impetus behind that piece. The other was, in fact, a discussion internal to the ranks of The Ecological Citizen, prior to my departure from the journal (this might sound like a tangent, but trust me that it will come back around to the topic of health). Some of the conversation concerned a now-deleted but formerly public “lexicon” page, which had been quite heavy-handed in emphasising that humans are part of nature, at times suggesting that it is contrary to ecocentrism (!) to conceptualise humans as separate from the rest of the natural world. (The now-deleted page went so far as to include ‘wilderness’ on a list of “problematic” terms in part on this basis, although fortunately the majority of editors were staunchly opposed to this inclusion when it was pointed out.) 

This was illuminating to me. Previously, I hadn’t really considered the possibility that other ecocentrists would reject the conception of nature as autonomous and, instead, interpret ecological holism in a way that embraces the assimilation of humans into the rest of nature (although it is surely a coherent position). Indeed, just a month previously, I had posted “On Rewilding (Whatever That Is),” in which I forefronted the ethical importance of respect for the autonomy of self-willed land (see also the recent reprint of the “prologue” in Rewilding Earth) and lambasted Paul Jepson and Cain Blythe for their praise of European “rewilding” as “unsettling and blurring” the boundaries between “wild-domestic” and “natural-cultivated” and “aspir[ing] to integrate” nature and people. When I wrote that piece, it seemed sufficient to condemn Jepson and Blythe as sounding like New Conservationists, and then reassert the position that respect for self-willed nature must be an axiom of any rewilding movement worth its name. What I hadn’t considered was that even some ecocentrists might at times “sound like New Conservationists” in aspiring to dismantle the same sorts of boundaries between human civilisation and wild nature; I had been mistaken myself to unsettle and blur the boundary between ecocentrism and respect for self-willed land. 

The claim that “humans are just part of nature” is one that’s often made in denying the need for wilderness conservation, while excusing cultivation, development, extraction, and other forms of anthropogenic exploitation across the entire surface of the globe. This is, of course, typically an anthropocentric manoeuvre. When they make the same claim themselves, ecocentrists need to dig themselves out of the hole they’ve created: if not a mandate to respect the autonomy of human-independent, self-willed nature, what justifies their vision of an “ecological civilisation” as one that prioritises giving space to nature-minus-humans? If they accept that “humans are just part of nature,” what stops ecocentrists from endorsing the continued existence of our bloated and sprawling industrial civilisation instead? If ecocentrists deny that nature can or should be conceptualised as autonomous – as possessing a “will of its own” – then they cannot appeal to the question “What is Nature’s will?” when attempting to determine whether a given intervention is or is not morally acceptable. Yet, at the same time, they cannot accept an “anything goes” outlook that permits humanity’s exploitation of the entire Earth in the name of “just being natural.” And here, finally, is where we arrive at the relevance of this apparent tangent: the preferred way around this, it seems, is to adopt a measure of the “health” of ecosystems or the biosphere (considered holistically, of course, not merely in the “ecosystem services” provided to human beings), which can then be used to determine whether a given intervention is ecocentrically morally acceptable. 

I imagine that many people wouldn’t baulk at this: what could be wrong with using an objective measure of health to assess whether human intervention benefits an ecosystem? I often cite such measures myself when speaking of the shocking extent to which humans have f–ked things up. After all, it seems pretty obvious that an average 69 percent decline in species populations in the past 52 years (as documented in the 2022 Dying Planet Report) indicates that humans are intervening in much of nature in a bad way – as does the report that 40 percent of Earth’s land is classified as degraded (according to a 2022 UN report). There is a difference, however, between using quantitative measures as evidence and deferring to them for the final verdict on the admissibility of a restoration effort. To me, the latter is a red flag that attempts to intervene on nature’s behalf may be paternalistic. We know that, in the case of humans, it is not generally advisable to allow externally created and imposed standards of health to override individuals’ own will and self-determination in choosing how to live their lives, at least when the justification is “for their own good” rather than (for example) public health concerns (which often do justify constraints on individual liberty, as we all learned in 2020 if not before). This gives us a prima facie reason, at least, also to be wary of imposing external standards of health upon nature, even when the justification is “for nature’s own good.”

The alternative, which I favour, is to attempt to rest the final verdict on the answer to the question “What is Nature’s will?” Nature can’t verbalise the answer, and we might seldom be able to ascertain a perfectly accurate and precise answer on the basis of historical baselines and projective modelling. But it is a way to orient our goals for restoration. Restoration can be both non-anthropocentric and anti-paternalistic. However, rather than directing our attention to meeting a certain prescribed outcome – whether one that we desire for ourselves or (paternalistically) for nature’s own good – we should ask what nature wants, and think of our efforts as removing constraints on nature’s own self-directed course of development. But, of course, this anti-paternalistic perspective requires conceiving of wild nature as autonomous, and thus rejecting the position of those ecocentrists who insinuate otherwise (and who can sound a bit like New Conservationists at times, and/or like Jepson and Blythe; I’ll leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide which is the more slanderous accusation). Fortunately, there’s good independent reason to conceive of wild nature as autonomous, such as the obvious fact that natural processes proceed independently of human activity (cf. §5). 

4. Is Paternalism a Real Threat to Conservation?

The paternalism worry arises only in the context of non-anthropocentrism, for it presupposes that conservationists are acting on nature’s behalf. But as I admitted at the outset, anthropocentrism is the much greater danger to the ethos and practice of conservation, restoration, and rewilding “in the real world.” So does anti-paternalism really matter? Sure, I have compelling personal reasons to target paternalism instead of anthropocentrism: in addition to my personal loathing of paternalism, the falsity of anthropocentrism is familiar and well-trodden territory; ecocentric paternalism is a philosophical terra nullius. In general, though, conservationists are not so interested in carving a new theory from some unoccupied corner of logical space, and more worried about taking action on the ground. And from this vantage point, it might seem that quibbling about paternalism is irrelevant. After all, as is commonly accepted in moral philosophy, what makes an action paternalistic is the justification given, the motives and reasons behind that action, not the action itself – and many or most conservationists are in it for the action! 

At the same time, however, there are some actions that we wouldn’t take at all if we didn’t think of others in a paternalistic manner. If a concerned “friend” were to sabotage my travel plans to prevent my hiking alone, one could concoct explanations that render the act non-paternalistic; perhaps, for example, my so-called friend is worried about the possibility that noisy helicopter search-and-rescue crews would disrupt the wilderness experience of other hikers and campers. Realistically, however, such an act would only be undertaken due to worry about my safety in combination with denial of my right to personal autonomy. A deliberate commitment to avoid paternalism can have practical consequences for our treatment of other people. Specifically, we are more likely to allow others to act on their own decisions without trying to stop them, even if we worry for their health and safety. But does any analogue hold when we speak of managing and restoring ecosystems? Realistically, are there any interventions that a conservationist might make paternalistically on nature’s behalf that we would not make if we took seriously the mandate to allow nature to pursue its own “will”? Or would ecocentrically minded conservationists converge on the same decisions whether they begin with the question of “What is Nature’s will?” or with paternalistic assumptions about what is best for nature? 

Well, there is little danger, I presume, that paternalistic ecocentrists will campaign for a planetary solar shield to protect the biosphere for its own good. But I do think that more down-to-earth examples are conceivable, when we consider commonly invoked standards for the health of the biosphere, such as biodiversity. (I apologise for uncreatively falling back on well-worn cases here. But, then again, I’ve not been provoked to write this piece due to encountering some new case study, unless it’s one regarding, say, rental home owners’ monitoring the author’s movements “for her own good” – but that’d merely explain the desire to write about paternalism, not any particular applications to wild nature.)

Consider, for example, a case study I’ve invoked previously (originally introduced to me via Twitter): the Cornish path moss (Ditrichum cornubicum), which is known from only two former copper mining sites, is considered critically endangered. The Cornish path moss co-evolved with extractive industries Cornwall to tolerate – and, indeed, require – mine waste with high concentrations of copper. Mining has since stopped at Cornwall. While this might be thought to liberate nature from millennia of human exploitation and degradation, conservationists in fact regard the cessation of copper mining as a threat to the survival of the rare Ditrichum cornubicum. Habitat management for this endangered bryophyte includes the use of heavy machinery to strip away soil and emergent vegetation and re-expose metalliferous ground. Biodiversity, by some measure, is a favourite externally-imposed standard of conservationists, and it’s one that can be readily co-opted by ecocentrists looking for an objective measure of ecological health (e.g. in trying to circumvent pressure to accept a moral mandate to respect nature as autonomous). The Cornish path moss is destined for extinction without the continued simulation of mining pressure, and this would be a loss to biodiversity not only locally but globally. At the same, however, it was surely never the “will” of nature – on any plausible interpretation – that humans establish a toxic mining industry in Cornwell, and it is equally difficult to conceive that nature’s present will is that the effects of mining continue to be simulated. On the contrary, what seems to be “nature’s will” is the spontaneous vegetational succession that began when mining stopped, and managing the land for Ditrichum cornubicum suppresses nature’s autonomous recovery from extractivism. 

If global biodiversity is adopted as an objective standard of nature’s health – and it surely is a popular choice – then it does seem that we have a moral mandate to sustain the existence of Ditrichum cornubicum. This therefore appears to be a case in which the prescriptions of the “health model” are likely to conflict with those of the “autonomy model.” Of course, my oft-referenced case study of the deforested Danish island of Anholt is another example in which conservation goals – in this case, the preservation of rare heathland habitats – conflict with the most plausible interpretation of “nature’s will” for the landscape: the island was originally forested, and its natural tendency (in the absence of human management) is to revert to forest; however, it is managed as wasteland, er, heathland (see “In Memory of Anholt”). If global diversity in habitats is accepted as another objective standard of nature’s health, then even some ecocentric conservationists might claim that we need to prevent natural afforestation on Anholt to preserve the globally rare lichen heath. If such coercive interventions are undertaken “for nature’s own good,” then they seem paternalistic in a most deplorable way – akin sending a gay teenager to conversion camp, perhaps – since they also rest upon an externally imposed notion of “health” that is ultimately stultifying.  

These might be extreme cases, but the protection of anthropogenically created landscapes and their associated biodiversity is a mainstay of European conservation. Granted, the conservation industry is too often not ecocentric from the outset, too often motivated instead by the protection of “natural capital” or “ecosystem services” for human benefit. Thus, “paternalistic ecocentrism” is almost certainly not to blame for most or all real-world cases of the suppression of nature’s will for the sake of desired conservation outcomes. But so what? Anthropocentrism is entirely off the table for me, and my interest is how to frame ecocentrism. And I claim that we ought to frame it in a way that steers clear of paternalism, in part to avoid the oppressive consequences that can result from the top-down imposition of standards. 

In recent past work, I introduced and developed what I called a “double bind” for the canonical European “rewilding” practice, typified by Rewilding Europe, of introducing large grazing animals to abandoned farmland to prevent vegetation growth and maintain a farm-like landscape. The purported justification of this practice, as is common in European conservation, is that nearly half of Europe’s biodiversity is dependent on agriculture. Meanwhile, the justification of calling it “rewilding” is that the grazing animals are thought to serve as substitutes for the vanquished megaherbivores of the Pleistocene. I won’t rehash the full argument here (if you aren’t familiar with it, you can find its most developed version in §4 of “American Rewilders Should Worry about Europe”); the upshot is that whether the practice is conceived as maintaining an agrarian baseline or attempting to replicate a Pleistocene one, it runs afoul of the duty to respect the autonomy of self-willed nature. I revisit it yet again to point out that each of its prongs can be framed in terms of paternalism. (To be sure, it might be a bit overly charitable to assume that Rewilding Europe per se presumes to act on nature’s behalf – even paternalistically – given its open anthropization of what it calls rewilding.) 

On the one hand, it is paternalistic to consign the land to the continued imposition of agrarian pressure for an indefinite number of life sentences (as measured in terms of the lives of its human managers) – as if we believe that nature has adapted so fully to our subjugation that it is no longer capable of flourishing in a self-willed state. On the other hand, it is paternalistic to assume that nature is incapable of its own autonomous recovery from the Pleistocene megafauna extinctions, and needs us step back in thousands of years late to deliver non-native translocated or de-domesticated “proxies” of the extinct fauna. Note that the latter is much different from (say) the reintroduction of grey wolves in the US, which, as I stated previously, seems merely like giving back something that we shouldn’t’ve taken in the first place, and thus not obviously paternalistic in any way. We shouldn’t have caused the Pleistocene megafauna extinctions either, to be sure, but in this case it’s not within our power to give back what we’ve taken (extinct is forever) – and thus the truly humble and respectful action might be simply to step back and allow nature to move forward according to its own terms and creative powers. It may be paternalistic to presume that nature needs our proxies. We might feel too impatient to wait for self-willed evolutionary processes to devise their own functional equivalents of the now-extinct fauna, but impatience is our problem, not nature’s.  

I hope that the above examples, although now old and familiar, suffice for present purposes to illustrate that the paternalism worry is not without potential practical ramifications. Specifically, there are certain types of conservation practices that we should avoid – or at least approach with caution – if we take seriously a mandate to respect nature’s capacity for autonomous self-development, and thus strive to avoid acting paternalistically.

However, I think that there is deeper practical matter at issue here (or maybe a more superficial one, depending on how one assesses such things): the rhetoric surrounding conservation and restoration is itself a practical matter. Ecocentrists already have quite the burden to bear in fighting against the juggernaut of anthropocentric conservation. Now, I absolutely don’t want to suggest that anyone abandon their considered moral beliefs to the sake of rhetoric; ecocentrists who deny nature’s autonomy and seek an external standard of health should continue to make their best arguments for what they believe (well, really, they should revise their beliefs, but until then…). For the rest of us, however, it does us no good to fall prey to rhetoric and arguments that deny the human/nature dichotomy and paint humans as custodians of the planet’s health, as defined and measured by us. We need to rethink what we are really demanding on nature’s behalf and why.

In his classic book Rewilding North America, Dave Foreman wrote that the goal of wildlands (designated wilderness areas, other protected core areas, and wildlife movement linkages) is to “protect and restore will-of-the-land (i.e., self-regulating ecosystems) and the wildeor (i.e., self-willed beasts)” (p. 164) and that a main goal of wilderness designation is “to help ecosystems become self-regulated (self-willed, untrammeled) again” (p. 194). Now there is the blueprint for a more positive vision based on what nature wants – neither what humans want, nor what humans believe nature should want for itself.

5. Is Nature Autonomous?

The above reflections have rested on the premise that nature can be conceived as autonomous in a morally relevant sense. I have probably referred to a concept of “respect for nature’s autonomy” in nearly everything I’ve written over the past half-year. Insofar as I’ve taken to analyse this idea, there seems to be one prevailing theme: at some level, this is simply a deliberate choice as to how we conceive of nature, but it is an honourable choice born of the sentiments that we tend to develop when we step beyond our limited and provincial human environments in both body and thought. The latter, moreover, is something that we ought to do, for both moral and epistemic reasons: it is demonstrably false that humanity is all there is, and forming a complete worldview (whether moral or scientific) requires us to acknowledge and attempt to understand the world and life outside of us. Choosing to respect nature as autonomous was the theme, for example, of “In Memory of Anholt…” (Jul 2022), in which I considered the implications of love, respect, and a sense of reciprocity toward a particular geographic location (where I felt able to actualise certain cherished personal freedoms, yet where nature was repressed and sustained in a state of human-caused degradation). Less personally and more theoretically, it was a main theme of my recently posted “Ecocentrism is Underspecified” (Jan 2023), in which I attempted to reclaim an important sense of “human/nature dualism” on the basis that we have the capacity to decide to withhold our influence on the more-than-human world, and emphasised the role of non-cognitive moral sentiments (like awe and humility) in motivating us to defer to and seek to preserve nature’s own creative potential.

In the remainder of this section (and post), I recap and summarise some other key points. 

Is nature autonomous? 

Yes. Isn’t this bloody obvious? Ecological and evolutionary processes are disposed to carry on in their own way without us, just as they have for billions of years before we came on the scene and developed the capacity to consciously interfere. Nature is most capable of evolving and thriving without any input from us, as it always has been. We can still witness this in the few places where nature is left untrammelled. Nature is not some string puppet that falls inert whenever we withdraw our influence – much the opposite, in fact.   

But is nature autonomous in the Kantian sense? 

No. Nature is not rational. Naturally unfolding ecological and evolutionary processes are neither conscious nor goal-directed – and that is, in fact, part of their beauty, fascination, and wonder, part of what commands awe and deference. It seems hard for us humans to conceive of the beauty and diversity of life as something shaped by mindless and arational chance processes, and yet that is exactly what happens; it forces us to admit that intelligent lifeforms with opposable thumbs aren’t the be-all, end-all of creativity and craftsmanship.  

Nature can’t be an autonomous agent in the Kantian sense, but then again no one granted Kant a monopoly on morally relevant senses of autonomy. My claim is that autonomous natural processes do inherently demand our respect – not out of empathy, for they are entirely unlike us, but out of wonder, admiration, awe, reference, and perhaps even gratitude for creating us and the biodiverse world in which we live. For how can we truly reflect on the deep-time evolutionary history of life on Earth without experiencing such sentiments? 

But how can nature still be autonomous in this time of anthropogenic climate change? 

Anthropogenic climate change affects the entire globe – including all that remains of wild nature – but so what? It’s irrelevant. It doesn’t imply that nature is no longer capable of functioning autonomously, and it doesn’t imply that that autonomy shouldn’t be respected in the numerous other contexts in which we still have a choice as to whether to interfere in the unfolding of ecological and evolutionary processes. 

Here is an analogy. My employer forces me – and all other employees – to contribute at least 10 percent of our salary to a retirement fund. There is no opt-out option. Ostensibly, this is paternalistic, forcing employees to save for our retirements “for our own good.” It sickens me. Suppose I were to complain to HR, and they replied as follows, “You are not truly an autonomous entity, since you rely on others to produce your food.” Or suppose (for the sake of argument) that I rented a holiday cottage from individuals who monitored my movements to make sure I’m “okay in there,” and I complained about feeling like I was being stalked. And suppose they were to reply, “You are not truly an autonomous entity, since you rely on others to produce your food.” Examples could be multiplied, but you get the point: none of us are genuinely autonomous; we all rely on others in some way. Thoreau took his laundry home to his mother (though I wonder why in the hell do people care so much about this). Ted Kaczynski borrowed a neighbour’s woodworking tools. And all this is totally irrelevant to most or all actual cases in which we demand respect for our autonomy. Despite our interdependence as humans, we remain justified in objecting to impositions on our autonomy. The fact that we depend on others in certain ways does not imply that our autonomy should not be respected in other domains – and as a general rule.

The entirety of Earth might be affected by anthropogenic climate change, forever chemicals, microplastics, and light pollution caused by the refraction and diffusion of sunlight by space junk. But this in no way entails that we have a right to log old growth forests, mine the sea floor, drain yet more of the Everglades for development, thwart natural forest regeneration to protect human-created heathland, or import megafauna at will to create safari parks. Certain results of human activities now unavoidably impact nature, but this does not mean that we should not still adhere to the general practice of respecting the autonomy of natural processes – removing barriers to nature’s freedom where we can, and refraining from further intervention. 

But why we really gotta respect nature’s autonomy? 🙁 

Now look. For years I resisted writing about ecological ethics, because I know that the job of inspiring concern for wild nature does not ultimately rest with philosophical argumentation. Natural processes function autonomously from human activity. This is merely a brute fact about how the universe has been for billions of years. But it’s nature itself – not science, not reason, not any arguments devised by moral philosophers – that commands respect for its self-determined creative powers. So go outside and take time truly to notice and marvel at what self-willed nature has created. Think about just how very little humans have had to do with any of this. Then you tell me why nature’s autonomy must be respected. 

Ecocentrism is Underspecified: Toward a Sentimentalist Ethic of Respect for Evolution

Download the article in pdf format: Ecocentrism is Underspecified

I think of this piece as the first instalment of an ongoing project of analysing and articulating a plausible moral foundation for rewilding. In it, I lay out the motivation and groundwork of my proposal: an ethic of respecting the creative potential of “self-willed” evolutionary processes, which I will develop in a manner partially inspired by moral sentimentalism and virtue ethics. This perspective is ecocentric; however, it is also importantly different from other possible ecocentric perspectives. For one, it’s “process-focused” instead of “product-focused” in locating the key bearer of intrinsic value (i.e. focusing on evolution instead of ecosystems, the biosphere, or biodiversity). For another, it aspires to reclaim a robust enough sense of a “human/nature distinction” to allow us to conceptualise these processes as autonomous, and thus to respect and protect them as such. In later work, I intend to contrast my position with other analyses of “respecting Nature’s autonomy” in the literature, and I’ll look more closely at potential practical consequences for restoration and rewilding.

Synopsis

Rewilding, in the first instance, must be ecocentric (§1). This follows from the fact that ecocentrism is true, and thus it must guide our policies impacting the more-than-human world just as much as respect for human dignity must guide our policies impacting members of our own species. At the same time, however, ecocentrism per se is insufficient as a moral basis for rewilding. What is missing is a means to adjudicate the extent to which human intervention is morally appropriate on behalf of the more-than-human world (§2). While I do not deny that humans can intentionally intervene in nature on nature’s behalf, we must be wary of the risk of paternalism – just as when we presume to intervene in other people’s affairs for their own good. For the paternalism worry to be coherent, we need a concept of wild nature as autonomous, which possibly would not sit well with ecocentrists who attempt to deny “human-nature dualism.” However, I argue that the latter ignores human agency and our ability to consciously choose how (and how much) to impact the rest of nature (§3). 

On the account that I propose, an ecological ethic must foreground the importance of respect for evolutionary processes (§4). Even under this specification, however, there remains an important question as to what this moral demand entails in practice, and it returns to similar questions regarding the appropriate nature and degree of human intervention (§5). I claim that respect for evolution, properly construed, is constituted not only by the acceptance of certain beliefs but also by the cultivation of certain sentiments toward natural evolutionary processes – such as wonder, reverence, and humility – and that the fitting sentiments are ones that tend to dispose us to favour actions that minimise intervention in natural processes (§6). While the account offered here is ultimately subjectivist, it offers a (possibly) novel starting point from which to approach questions of our moral obligations to wild nature and their implementation.

To read the rest of the paper, you must download in pdf form (because I prefer to format pdfs than u.osu.edu webpage posts).

Here it is: Ecocentrism is Underspecified