Environmental studies  and The Eye of the Beholder

Project description

An anthropocentric view of the valuation of nature is compelling because who other than humans can consciously value something beyond its usefulness too them? Do you

think an animal will sit back and appreciate nature for its aesthetic appeal? I don’t know that an animal can value anything beyond its usefulness to their survival.

Instinct drives them. It can then be argued that “we humans cannot know enough about what these animals and plants are like in themselves to escape our own blinders”

(Rolston, 2012, pg 117). This means that we need to get over ourselves and recognize the possibility that nature has intrinsic value in a nonanthropocentric realm.

Hettinger remarks on a statement made by Rolston “it is arrogant to think that for hundreds of millions of years flourishing nature on Earth was actually valueless and

then became valuable when humans arrived to bestow value on it” (Hettinger, 2012, pg 121). I agree with this statement, it is arrogant indeed. Did nothing have value

to anything prior to humans showing up on the scene? This brings me back to Rolston’s objective intrinsic values, based on the eye of the beholder. This seems to make

the most sense to me. I am not a believer for the sake a believing; typically I need evidence or a compelling and reasonable argument to sway me. I think that a

viewpoint conversion from anthropocentric to biological to geological depending on “the beholder” is a plausible argument to grasp and not justify a strictly human

centric view of nature.