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.