Non-backward-looking Naturalness as an Environmental Value

摘要

In their Environmental values, John O'Neill, Alan Holland and Andrew Light argue that history should matter in environmental decision-making. One reason for the importance of history is that the concept of 'natural' is historical and naturalness is relevant to environmental decision-making. [W]e need to take history seriously in our understanding of environmental values. One reason for taking history seriously is that the concept of natural as opposed to artificial is historical. The concept of 'naturalness' is a spatio-temporal concept. There is no such thing as a state or condition of something which constitutes its 'being natural' or an identifiable set of characteristics which makes any item or event 'natural'. Being natural is, and is only, determined by origin and history: it is a spatio-temporal concept, not descriptive one. (O'Neill, Holland & Light, 2008, p. 148.) O'Neill, Holland and Light are arguing for environmental significance of a form of naturalness that has been quite widely discussed in environmental ethics. The arguments concerning the value of restored ecosystems, for example, often rely on this kind of backward-looking sense of 'natural' (see for instance Katz, 1997a, 1997b; Elliot, 1982, 1997; Lo, 1999). Backward-looking senses of 'natural' refer to happenings in the past of an entity. The way an entity has come into being and the kind of modifications it has gone through are central to this form of naturalness.