John O’Neill, Alan Holland, and Andrew Light have developed an argument for the impor- tance of narrative in environmental ethics with significant implications for how we value the wild. O’Neill et al. distinguish two ways people value the world around us: “end- state or outcome- based” approaches in which we value things “simply in virtue of their display- ing some cluster of properties”; and “historical or process- based” approaches in which we value things “not merely as a cluster of properties but as particular individuals individu- ated by a temporal history and spatial location” (2008: 144– 145). O’Neill et al. claim that many of the values people find in nature are of the latter kind. “History matters … in our evaluations of environments,” they believe, while various management choices “receive their
Valuing Wild Nature 133 justification through some sense of what is the appropriate continuation of the story of a place” (2008: 145– 146).
I agree that historical narratives must play a role in our environmental ethics if we hope to do justice to the full range of values at stake in environmental decisions. Yet O’Neill et al.
focus narrowly on the various meanings people project onto the landscape, forgetting that other species also have histories that matter. For example, they criticize descriptions of Yellowstone National Park as a wilderness because this allegedly overlooks the contribu- tions Native Americans played in creating the landscape, ignoring the fact that legal wil- derness designation best secures the continued existence and free ecological interactions of thousands of species for whom the park has been home for millennia. O’Neill et al. set up a false dichotomy by saying they favor “the historical perspective rather than an approach that advocates a return to nature” (2008: 160), overlooking the fact that history includes natu- ral history. Their anthropocentric approach has room to appreciate the ecological role the Miwok Indians played by setting fires in the Yosemite Valley two hundred years ago, but not the ecological roles of Giant Sequoia trees, which evolved in the late Miocene Era six to ten million years ago and which have been helping set fires in the Yosemite region ten thousand times longer than people.
Environmental ethicists need to apply the narrative insight more broadly. We do need to respect the heritage and meanings people find “on the ground” in helping decide how the stories of different places should continue. But we can also appreciate the stories that other species have written onto the land (Monbiot, 2014). Those stories are good stories, often manifesting great beauty, complexity, and persistence. They deserve to continue, and at least in some places to continue free from human interference.
Natural species have intrinsic value in part because they are the products of unique jour- neys through deep evolutionary time. By nearly extinguishing the whooping crane North Americans have come perilously close to ending a journey that has lasted tens of millions of years. The details of the whoopers’ physiology, life- ways, migrations, and ecological inter- connections are interesting in themselves and mark these birds as well worth preserving.
But the full meaning of what may be lost (or saved) only becomes clear when we remember that whooping cranes are unique in the stream of time. Nothing exactly like them will ever come again, and the same may be said for all the wild kinds that human beings threaten to extinguish.
Once again the narrative insight must be broadened: this time to encompass humanity’s own role in the story of life on Earth. In Homo sapiens nature knows its own stories, perhaps for the first time. But rather than calling these stories “good,” appreciating them and ensur- ing that they continue, we are on track to end many of them in the sixth mass extinction since complex life began some 650 million years ago. Paleontologists tell us that after past mass extinctions it has taken five million to twenty million years to recapture previous lev- els of diversity. So if we continue on our current path we will not see this lost biodiversity replaced in our lifetimes and quite likely no human beings will ever see it replaced. It is even possible that Earth’s biodiversity might never fully recover if people sufficiently damage the resources necessary for life’s regeneration. If this comes to pass our story will be one in which humanity defines itself either as a cancer on the biosphere, blindly growing in a way that destroys its host (Hern, 1999), or as a genocidal horde, extinguishing other species simply in order to create more room for itself (Gottlieb, 2009).
134 Philip Cafaro
Thankfully there is a better way. With discipline and restraint we can allow nature’s sto- ries to continue, free from human domination in many places and graced by human under- standing, appreciation, and gratitude. As Holmes Rolston notes: “Humans want a storied residence in nature where the passage of time integrates past, present, and future in a mean- ingful career. This does not make nature a mere instrument in a human story, any more than it makes the fellow persons in our drama merely tools. Rather, we have reached the richest possible concept of life in community, one in which all the actors contribute to storied resi- dence” (1988: 351).
What does this mean in practice? At a minimum it means people should allow every natu- ral species to continue to flourish in its native habitat, even if in reduced numbers, and allow some places to remain as wild as possible. To achieve these goals environmentalists need to redouble our traditional efforts to create new national parks, wildlife preserves, and wil- derness areas (Noss, 2011), while working more broadly to replace our current cultures of extinction with societies that can live harmoniously with other species. That in turn means not just accepting but embracing limits to growth (Cafaro and Crist, 2012): both limits to human numbers and limits to human economic expansion. Nothing less will preserve wild nature in the long term, and in the long term that will be best for us, too. For as Henry Thoreau reminded his readers 160 years ago: “Our village life would stagnate if it were not for the unexplored forests and meadows which surround it. We need the tonic of wildness … We can never have enough of Nature” (1971: 317– 318).
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