Environmental Ethics There Are Few Essay

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The silo argument is similar to the laboratory argument, but it focuses on the tangible things nature has to offer -- not just the knowledge of medicine that certain plants can provide, but the plants themselves that are used to make the medicine. This argument acknowledges that though nature can provide many material resources, these resources are limited, and if they are harvested and/or utilized in such a way that prevents their steady regeneration -- that is, in a way that disrupts or destroys the natural processes surrounding the given material, be it plant, mineral, or animal -- they will be lost. Much like the knowledge that would be lost in the laboratory argument, the adherents to the silo argument fear the loss of vital and potentially life-changing resources that are known and posited to exist in various wildernesses. Such a loss would be irreversible, because the commodities available in natural wilderness are very often impossible to produce artificially.

Another good selfish argument is the gymnasium argument. Nature provides sources for physical recreation unlike anything available artificially; to achieve the same sights, sounds, and smells of a wilderness hike, one must go on a wilderness hike. Climbing a rock wall at Yosemite simply cannot be compared to climbing one at an indoor gym somewhere, and the unique recreational activities available in wilderness areas will be lost if the wilderness itself is lost. For some, this would be the weakest argument for nature preservation as it leads to no good outside of itself; for others this might make it the strongest argument.

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For still others, such as the great American thinker often credited with starting the Transcendentalist school, Ralph Waldo Emerson, all of these arguments are only partially correct, and they miss the major point completely.

Emerson saw nature not only as something "out there," but also as something inherent to ourselves. He believed that we had intimate knowledge of nature in our innocence, and that it was only the false layers of knowledge that were overlaid atop this innocence that made us believe we were somehow separate from nature. In this he echoed certain concepts found in Romantic poetry, specifically that of Wordsworth. Each of the above arguments addresses only a small part of the real problem -- that a destruction of nature is a denial and destruction of ourselves. Each of these arguments can be seen as simply a way of acknowledging our own -- and nature's -- usefulness. It is not that we are robbing ourselves of religious experience, or knowledge, or material goods, or even simply enjoyable exercise when we destroy nature -- at least, it is not only that -- but we are really not utilizing ourselves fully when this occurs. When the man-nature organism is functioning in harmony, such destruction would be literally unthinkable......

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