The Value of Nature?

Value is often thought to be human-generated, bestowed on nature by our interests, and thus fundamentally instrumental. Holmes Rolston III argues [article attached, in MeetUps], however, that the natural world has its own value. He tries to lead us from our anthropocentric perspective to one in which we see that individual animals and organisms have value in themselves, that aggregates such as species and ecosystems have what he refers to as systemic value, and, at the limit, that the Earth and even Nature Itself are intrinsically valuable. How far should we follow Rolston?

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