People or Penguins: My Perspective

My thoughts on Baxter’s essay are complicated, like the issue he tries to tackle. Baxter’s argument rests on his belief that animals, plants, and other elements of the natural world should not be considered important apart from the benefits they impart to humans, because nature has no intrinsic value. I can’t say that I agree with Baxter here. I think that nature does have intrinsic value, because God created it. However I agree that humans should always come before nature, so I suppose I agree with the conclusion of Baxter’s argument – that nature should only be preserved to the point that its preservation is more beneficial to humans than…non-preservation (to euphemize it). I suppose Baxter might say that this assertion is equivalent to saying that nature has no intrinsic value, but I like to think it’s not. I think both nature and humans have intrinsic value (as God’s creations) but that humans are more important, or have more intrinsic value, than nature (because God created humans in His image, not penguins and pine trees). And yes, this is anthropocentric, but I don’t think that is a bad thing, following the reasoning of my previous sentence.

All of this being said, I think that penguins impart many more benefits to humans than amusement at the way they walk about rocks. I think God designed the world’s environment in such a way that every part of it is connected, and I doubt that we fully understand those connections right now. We all know that if honey bees disappear we’re in big trouble because we won’t be able to grow crops for food. I think we probably depend on penguins as well as honey bees, even if we can’t see that right now because penguins don’t do anything as obvious as pollinate our crops. But I’m sure that penguins keep the Antarctic ecosystem in balance, and that the balance of the Antarctic ecosystem affects other, tangential ecosystems, which in turn affect the ecosystems surrounding them, and so on across the earth. I, for one, don’t want to mess with this world ecosystem, which none of us fully understand.

So what I’m saying is: All parts of nature have an unknown (and I suspect quite large) value to the well-being of humans, and we should understand this and work to preserve nature accordingly. How will we do that? Well, my first inclination is to support Friedman’s argument to let the market work on the issue. If enough people understand how much we need nature, and reflect that in their purchases (vote with the dollar, as they say) then soon enough all businesses will put their competitive energies into avoiding harm to nature because that will be a necessary endeavor for them to turn a profit. This is an idealistic picture; it’s probably pretty hard to get people to believe that all of nature is important and to reflect that in their decisions as consumers. In addition I’m not sure the market is lucid enough for that to work. As far as I know companies don’t currently advertise their pollution levels. But I still think that capitalism with minimal regulations has been, historically, the best way to go. So that’s the most favorable solution in my mind at this point.