The Politics of the Environment: Ideas, Activism, Policy, 2nd Edition

Environmental philosophy

Figure 2.2What entities have value?

SENTIENT BEINGS

INDIVIDUAL ENTITIES

INDIVIDUAL LIVING

PLANTS/TREES

BIOSPHERE

(SPECIES)

ECOSPHERE

(MOUNTAINS, RIVERS)

HUMANS

(ANTHROPOCENTRISM)

NON-HUMAN ANIMALS

(ANIMAL LIBERATIONISM)

WHOLE CATEGORIES

To summarise, this section has shown that greens object to the anthro-
pocentric basis of most traditional ethical and political theory. They argue
that value should be accorded not simply to humans but also to nature. We
now need to know whatkindof value (instrumental, inherent or intrinsic)
can be ascribed to nature, whatpartsof nature have value and onwhat
groundsthat value is accorded (see Figure2.1). There are two dominant
ways ofapproaching these questions in environmental ethics – ‘holism’
and ‘moral extensionism’ – which are critically analysed in the following
sections.

Critical question 1
Is it important to show that nature has value independent of human needs?

◗ Holistic perspectives

The most radical approaches adopt a holistic analysis of the human–nature
relationship: they include all ecocentric perspectives, notably deep ecology,
and the group of intermediate approaches known as ‘ethical holism’ (see
Box2.3). Holism is concerned with the way the different parts of nature
interact with each other in ecosystems and the biosphere – the inter-
dependence and reciprocity that make up the ‘whole’ – rather than atom-
istic accounts of nature that focus on individual parts in isolation. A holistic
view of nature holds that everything is connected to everything else, that
the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, that process takes primacy
over the parts and that there is unity of humans and non-human nature