Holmes Rolston delivered a lecture entitled `Caring for Nature: From Fact to Value, from Respect to Reverence` on Tuesday 9th March 2005 in the Winstanley Lecture Theatre, Trinity College, Cambridge. The lecture was subsequently followed by a dinner/discussion with the speaker was held at St Edmunds College, Cambridge. An edited transcript of this discussion follows. It was chaired by Prof. Brian Heap (St Edmunds College) with introductory remarks by Prof. Partha Dasgupta (Cambridge University). The other contributors are described at the end of the discussion.
Discussion
Brian Heap: Welcome, everybody, to the third part of our evening. I’m sure we would all like to thank Holmes Rolston for a fascinating lecture. He’s brought to us a whole series of issues which are of great interest and importance to many of us in the room. Thank you for responding so positively to the invitation to come to dinner.
A couple of years ago we had, in this room, the pleasure of a dinner/discussion evening with James Lovelock. You may or may not know that at the age of thirty-nine he left the safety of his cosy research institute at Mill Hill because he was afraid of becoming bored with working in an institute and he launched into a very adventurous new career – he set up a laboratory in his house which led to Gaia. He said at the time that he felt like the man in the Limerick :
There was a young man who said damn
It appears to me that I am
A being who moves in predestinate grooves
Not a bus, not a bus
But a tram.
And he also said somewhat later that one reason why Gaia has had such a hard time is that few scientists have a proper grasp of self-regulating systems and if the earth is indeed a living, self-regulating system, where does that leave our duty of care for nature and the policies we adopt.
I thought one area we might probe tonight is thinking of what Holmes has spoken about, of this other view of the earth, this extraordinary planet on which we live, where people believe it is a self-regulating system and “you just let it run”.
Another theme that struck me this evening was again this issue of attaching value to nature and I found the idea a very interesting one, that a person who finds on earth only accidental riches is less wealthy than one who inhabits a system bent on enriching the diversity of life. We live in a world which is preoccupied with valuing itself on the basis of its monthly figures for gross domestic product, a concept that’s been attacked as flawed and which fails to tell us anything about the true cost of anything. We have world experts with us tonight who may well wish to probe this area of how we attach value to nature and the world in which we live, and how it affects human well-being.
And then the third aspect: if it is true that biology has no covering law or trend enabling us to say what we might expect, and that its only function is a capacity to survive, why do we spend so much time on philosophy and science and religion? I thought perhaps we could start with this particular area of value because that is something which you have touched on several times this evening during your lecture. I wondered whether there was anything there that had particularly resonated with some of your work, Partha, which has been particularly focused in this area.
Partha Dasgupta: Thank you very much. You raised so many intriguing questions in your lecture that it's going to be hard to constrain ourselves. In order to initiate a discussion, I would like to start somewhat tangentially by picking up on a question Kirsten posed to you at the end of your lecture. I wasn't at ease with your response. Your reply struck me as being overly anthropomorphic: if certain "bugs" are a nuisance to us Humans, then let's destroy them; however, if they are a nuisance to other animals, why, then, let Nature take its course!
I think this is a disingenuous view of matters. I have no doubt that if you personally were to see an animal suffering, you would try to do something about it (within reasonable bounds of course). I cannot believe you would say, "let Nature take its course". (I certainly would try to do something about the animal, and know that I should, within reasonable bounds of course.) But the suffering could be a result of "bugs" destroying the animal's metabolic system. In any event, to arrive at the notion of "reasonable bounds" involves valuation of goods and services, and it involves the far more difficult exercise of weighing the "claims" of animals of various sizes and shapes against our own claims as Humans. This is why environmental economists (especially those in the United states ) engage in valuation exercises. Their idea is to find ways and means by which to determine how people actually value different elements of Nature – by asking them directly, by inferring from the choices people make, and so forth. The reason they try to determine how people actually value the elements of Nature, rather than inquire into their intrinsic worth, is that ethicists (other than Peter Singer!) don't give us any guidance on the matter.
As it happens, I am not overly enthusiastic with the preoccupations of environmental economists in the United States . It is all well and good to say that the giant redwoods or the blue whales possess intrinsic worth and that we should try to determine the extent to which people actually value them, but the blue whales are threatened with extinction and it is worth finding out why. What research strategy do you think is available then to someone like myself, who believes that the blue whales should not be driven to extinction? One thought that we would wish to pursue is that they are harvested under the umbrella of bad institutions (free entry into the open oceans by whalers), another would be that their instrumental importance to ecosystems are under-appreciated, even by the whalers themselves. Since most ethicists don't appear to come up with any guidance (other than to say that the blue whales possess intrinsic worth), economists such as myself adopt a wholly instrumental approach. We begin by assuming that the elements of Nature possess only instrumental worth, that is, their only worth is as economic objects. In the case of blue whales, we then ask what society's rational harvesting policy would be, given that blue whales can breed and supply progeny that would be worth to future Humans. To be sure, this is to adopt an absurd ethical position, but let's see where it may lead us.
Imagine we were to value blue whales entirely in terms of their commercial worth as sources of oil and meat. Given current and prospective market prices for whale products and given our understanding of the reproductive rates of blue whales, we may ask at what rates whalers, as a collective, would choose to harvest the whales for their present and future commercial profits. Suppose, for the sake of argument, it is found that at relatively low rates of discount, the whalers, as a body collective, would maximise their commercial profits over time by agreeing to a moratorium on whaling for a couple of decades (in order to enable the blue whales to multiply in numbers) and then to harvest them at a sustainable rate. We could then say that the blue whales ought to be preserved solely on instrumental grounds, and that, to impute intrinsic worth to them would only increase the case for conservation! We could then also say that the reason the blue whales are currently being hunted to extinction is a faulty system of property rights, namely, that the open seas are a global commons. This is the advantage of exploring the implications of biased models. I should say that the example has not been pulled out of a hat. The desirability of a moratorium on the hunting of blue whales on commercial grounds was established over thirty years ago!
Holmes Rolston: If you’re already saying that your view is minimalist and absurd I don’t see I have a question to answer! But let’s first go back to the redwood trees. In Sequoia National Park we had a famous redwood tree called the Wawona Tree which had a tunnel cut through it and people amused themselves by driving through this tree. I have driven through it myself and I have a photograph to show it. That tree stood a hundred years from the horse and buggy days until it blew over in a big storm in1976 or 7 leaving only a stump. After a couple of years people came to the rangers and said they would like to have another drive-through sequoia and the rangers said “no”. Now, would it have been proper at that point to do a cost-benefit analysis, an economic account and see whether more money was to be gained by the additional tourists, charge them if you like three or four dollars to drive through the tree, or is that a question we can answer without benefit of economic analysis?
Partha Dasgupta: It seems to me, the answer is that you need a complementary set of tools. The reason we economists often adopt a minimalist position as regards the worth of Nature's elements (valuing those elements solely in terms of their commercial worth is to adopt a minimalist position) is that ethicists don't provide any additional guidance. Moreover, as I have just shown in the context of research findings on the blue whales, if preservation can be shown to be the correct course of action under such minimalist assumptions regarding their worth, we don't need the ethicist's guidance in order to advocate their preservation.
Holmes Rolston: Oh we give you some guidance – respect the integrity of the tree.
Partha Dasgupta: Economists will immediately ask you what the trade off rate is, at what price we should respect the integrity of the tree.
Holmes Rolston: And the trade off is to be conducted in pounds sterling, or dollars and cents?
Partha Dasgupta: You could conduct them in terms of apples, that's not the point. The unit of account is not the issue; sterling is just a currency.
Holmes Rolston: Are there some situations in which humans ought to lose economic benefit in order that nature should be respected?
Brian Heap: We have the former secretary of the International Whaling Commission here.
Holmes Rolston: Whaling began as an economically maximizing thing to the whale. The Whaling Commission has changed its objective over the years.
Ray Gambell: Totally – it has changed totally during my term of tenure. Not my doing, because let me, as it were, lay my cards on the table. I believe in rational use …
Holmes Rolston: And not the economist’s sense of use?
Ray Gambell: Well this is the problem, because you can define your terms in a variety of different ways depending on your starting point. But what I would like to take up is the last question we had in the lecture session concerning the influence of harmful bugs and parasites. In your answer, effectively you were saying where they impacted on the human and influence the human’s well-being, let’s get rid of them – but the rest of the time they can go on doing their thing.
Holmes Rolston: Yes.
Ray Gambell: That I think leads you to place humankind separate and outside from the rest of nature.
Holmes Rolston: Indeed so, in this respect it does.
Ray Gambell: I find that this is a difficult position to take because I think that we are part of nature and our best rôle is taking a full part, rather than separating ourselves out.
There is another side to this concerning the blue whale. The whaling industry has a terrible history of over-utilisation. The reaction to that from the 1970s onwards was that the environmental groups – who were not strictly environmentalists in any normal definition, they were protectionists – wanted to stop the industry taking any more whales. The outcome of that position became very extreme to the point where whale ships were sunk and people were injured; I myself was attacked in meetings as representing the IWC. The effect was that whales became more important than people and the answer you gave left me with a dilemma: on the one side I think you were suggesting that humans were separate from nature and we have in reality, in the real world, the situation where the animal is more important than the human altogether. I see a dichotomy there which I find very difficult to square – if can you square a dichotomy!
Brian Heap: Can I just ask Kirsten, who asked the question, to express her view because I know she said to me that she wasn’t satisfied with the answer either.
Kirsten Hagon: Yes, I would like to. I have a couple of concerns with your response. One of these is that there is a possible corollary of if it’s OK to destroy things that might destroy us, what does that mean for preserving things? Do we therefore only preserve things that will preserve us, is that the opposite of that?
My other question relates to a number of environmental debates, and there is a debate that I have had in my own environmental rule class: is the reason that we want to protect the environment and biodiversity because of the benefit that we individually get from it as human beings based on health or based on pleasure; or is it because it has an intrinsic value of its own? Now, if it is, for example, based entirely on health and on pleasure then every single being – this issue of whether or not we should destroy or preserve should make no difference whether it has a direct impact on us. For example, whether a microorganism will kill us or not, it shows exactly the same relationship to us. I’m not sure that I was completely happy with the answer that was given. I don’t know if you have a comment on that.
Brian Ford: There are one or two matters I’d like to raise. To begin with, you said earlier that ‘we believe’ that ultimately nature can be valued in terms of, as it were, the financial bottom line. No – they believe this, we don’t. I have no doubt that in a generation people will look back in astonishment at how we contrived to debase nature and the environment, and measured what we did in terms of the dollar. The use of mere money as an arbiter of human wantonness is a relic of Victorian thinking and in my view it will not last as a serious criterion for another generation.
The second matter I need to raise is more a matter of definition. We have been speaking of the smallpox virus as a ‘parasite’. This isn’t right. It is not a parasite, but a pathogen. Parasites have complicated life cycles and travel from one vector to another – from one host to another. Pathogens simply cause infection. Many of those we have feared above all are, in real terms, inefficient examples. For example, pathogens like the smallpox virus are bad news for themselves, since – by killing the host – they remove their food source. An example of a more successful pathogen would be the cold virus which causes little more than a mild rhinitis and therefore allows us to live and itself to replicate on us, too.
Then there was the notion of a Utopian existence – it is such a pleasant, New Testament, reassuring, comforting concept. As you said yourself, Dr. Rolston, it is summed up in the image of the lion lying down peacefully with the lamb. Well, were that to happen, and you alluded to this yourself, the lions would soon become extinct through starvation. The lambs would as well. With the explosive fecundity that would occur with predation removed, they would surely eat themselves out of existence.
There is no life without death, there is no pleasure without suffering; all life is predicated upon the death of what went before. Although the notion that we can have some wonderfully calm Utopian world where nothing goes wrong persists in modern thinking, it is misplaced. If nothing wrong ever befell contented creatures, the cycles of nature would cease to operate. Even the poor smallpox virus would have nowhere to go. We may not like it, but its mother thought it was wonderful!
Arguments in this area have often been couched in terms where they don’t match the realities of science and the true interpretation of the environment. As we always do, we are trying to model the future in terms that are founded upon the past or the present. For the problems we are now facing, I think many of those are now outdated and effete. I have to say that I’ve rarely felt a sort of glimmer of resonance with an economist before but I did feel one this evening!
Holmes Rolston: Let’s address the nature-culture distinction a bit. Yes, we are part of nature but most of my environmentalist friends think I ought to stop right there. But I think it’s equally true that we are apart from nature, that is to say I distinguish between nature and culture. With the coming of culture ideas passed from mind to mind. The determinants of human affairs can be religious, they can be ethical, they can be political, they can be economic in the business, investment, labour, sense – none of those are determinants of animal affairs. We can operate with justice, charity and love, and it seems to me that different orders of the determinants of affairs come into existence in cultural systems, levels of determinants that are not present in pre-human or in non-human nature. I want in a sense to use the word “culture” – chimps may learn to use this tool or that – but at least a cumulative, transmissible culture is distinctive to humans and I think that sets us apart from the other five million species on earth. I think it means that natural selection no longer operates as the main, or only, or even principal determinant in human affairs. I think of plants and animals, especially if they’re left in ecosystems, operating under natural selection but I think humans are different.
Another of the capacities that humans have is to know who they are, where they are. Humans are the only species that can oversee or look out over the world and have a sense of being on a planet, have a sense of community with other creatures. Of course creatures see the grass that they eat, or a tiger catches animals and eats them and they’re in the world, they inhabit a world, but they have no grand view of the nature of things. Now I think with humans that gives us a responsibility as well as a privilege. We are the only species that puts the planet in jeopardy and we are the only species that can appreciate the richness and wealth of diversity. Perhaps I can use a classic phrase, noblesse oblige. This nobility gives us obligations and maybe now obligations to save the whales, even if it’s not a matter of maximizing tourism or maximizing all of the whale products. One of the splendid possibilities of humans that they can be ethically concerned about the saving of endangered species. That’s marvellous, that if you like enriches us, but it’s a matter of caring for others. Let’s do a show of hands. How many people in this room think that there are some situations in which humans ought to lose on behalf of the integrity of animals. Hands up.
Derek Burke: I think it depends what you lose. I wouldn’t be prepared to lose my life. I probably would be prepared to put up with personal inconvenience but I don’t think you can phrase the question so generally, with respect.
Holmes Rolston: Are there some situations in which you would be prepared to think of yourself as giving up some good on behalf of an animal.
Derek Burke: If it’s putting a coin in the collecting box in the High Street in Cambridge , yes of course, all of us would. So I don’t think it’s an absolute question, I think it’s a question of what values we use in making those decisions and where we draw lines, it isn’t a “yes” or “no” question.
Holmes Rolston: Well let’s try this. I wrote a celebrated article in which I said that I was in Nepal where there’s a tiger sanctuary. Nearby there are villagers who, of course, would like to graze their cattle in this park but they are prohibited from doing so by the Nepalese army guarding the park. Are there situations in which the preservation of the tiger can justify fencing people out of parks where there are a number of people who would like to graze their cattle?
Derek Burke: The answer is “yes” as long as you can care for those people in an appropriate fashion. I wouldn’t let them starve.
Holmes Rolston: Yes, but you might have to at some point.
Derek Burke: I’m not sure I would do that .
Holmes Rolston: So you’d sacrifice the tigers?
Derek Burke: I would work towards another solution
Holmes Rolston: You’re ducking the question there.
Derek Burke: I think you’re posing us false questions. I think you’re putting dilemmas that are not real dilemmas.
Holmes Rolston: It’s a real dilemma.
Derek Burke: These are always priority questions – we have to decide which option is the more important and ask ourselves whether we can we solve the problem in other ways.
Holmes Rolston: You’ve got to tell those soldiers to say to these people “you can’t bring your cattle into this park” and as a result of that some of those people, who are on the edge of poverty and starvation, are going to die.
Andrew Blaza: Well, the only thing I would say to that is if that local population values the tigers live more than they do dead – I assume the tigers are there and that tourists are prepared to pay to come and watch them, and I assume that the reason that the local population do not like it is that they are not participating in the income from the tourists. If you can make it a community-based tourism project where the individuals there gain from it, it is likely to be more successful – how much does the local population share in the income?
Holmes Rolston: One third of the income?
Andrew Blaza: That’s not enough. Nearer 95% would be better.
Susan Owens: I think we’re falling into the fallacy of sustainability, that there’s always a win-win situation. It seems to me increasingly obvious that there are not always win-win situations so we have to make very tough choices.
Andrew Blaza: There are going to be more losers than winners in sustainability – at least initially.
Brian Heap: Susan, what are your views on this? Susan is a member of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution
Susan Owens: Can I go back to a slightly fishy theme which is on my mind at the moment, because as a member of a Commission that is involved in a major study of marine environment we do these fairly big studies of report plots which come out about once every eighteen months or two years.
I was on a trawler in the Irish Sea last Friday as part of this study. I have no problem at all personally in feeling an immense reverence and awe for what is there in the deep. It’s hidden from most of us most of the time but when you look into it it’s quite astonishing and awe-inspiring. But that doesn’t answer the question that keeps coming up in our study, which is why should we conserve marine biodiversity?
I know that there are lots of instrumental answers – it provides a livelihood for lots of people, it has services, functions for humanity and so on. To all of those questions we can find answers that talk about maximum sustainable yields for whales and other fish. We are actually decimating the oceans, we have fished down the food chain and have taken out most of the major predators. Someone described to me what we do with trawling as like “bulldozing for rabbits”. It’s immensely destructive of the seabed as well. We know all these things, but it still doesn’t answer the question because clearly one could envisage different levels of marine biodiversity that were sustainable and the question then is which level would we like to sustain? At the moment we’re not doing it rationally, we’re not doing it economically, because we’re not even getting maximum sustainable yield. We’re certainly, I think, not doing it ethically. I take issue with Partha, by the way, contrasting economics and ethics since it seems to me economics clearly has a basis somewhere in the framework of all this. How does one operationalise the reverence, that’s the question?
Holmes Rolston: You switch from the language of sustainable development and substitute the language of a sustainable biosphere.
Susan Owens: It still then begs the question, sustainable at what level? We started exploiting the oceans a long time ago so we struggle with the basics. But going back to the problem of the non-existent win-win situation, we are often in a situation of conflict where our reverence for non-human nature comes crunching up against our reverence for the rest of humanity and those are the situations where actually we need some practical guidance.
Holmes Rolston: Well, unlike the tiger situation no humans are going to die if we stop dunking toxins into the ocean.
Brian Ford: Let’s look further at the question of conserving the tiger. There must be a model here somewhere. Surely, if you were to remove the barriers and allow the cattle into the tiger reserve, then the tigers would be satisfied. This could be the biggest boost to their food supply that they’d had for a very long time. Isn’t it true that by simply applying quotas and imposing restrictions in the search for cost-effectiveness, we prevent natural mechanisms from rectifying imbalances?
Holmes Rolston: It won’t work there because the cattle eat the grass and the villagers cut the grass for thatch and to feed the cattle and then the deer that the tigers eat are destroyed, and the tigers lose their food base.
In the oceans I think you can get some indicators of ecological health if you steadily loosen species where the system is simplifying steadily, if there are uses of balloons with over-supply of nutrients and those kinds of things. I think a good person could get a list of ten or twelve good indicators of environmental health or integrity of marine ecosystems and work from that.
Susan Holmes: But they’ll always contest it.
Brian Heap: Could we perhaps move from that area into another area which you were touching on this evening, that of course is the evolutionary aspect and the extent to which humans are different and the way in which evolutionary systems have converged on particular solutions through evolutionary mechanisms. I’m looking at Simon, who was referred to this evening in the course of the lecture on a number of occasions.
Simon Conway-Morris: Thank you, Brian. I agree entirely with the comments you made about us being special. It’s not clear to me immediately why we are, but clearly we are. The background to that is actually quite opaque. I would like to mention something which goes slightly back to our previous discussion and what I think is also related to it. Alister McGrath, who may not be too popular around some parts of this table, has just produced a large trilogy, the first of which is called Nature. As you may have read, and as I understand it, his argument has partly to do with how we regard ourselves as different, yet are little more than trousered apes, especially when we come to these utilitarian arguments which are wheeled out the whole time, is with respect to nature. In fact everybody used to work round it and generally we in the west have a rather huggy-fuggy feeling about it but is completely incoherent, it has almost no definition worth defending.
Holmes Rolston: What’s completely incoherent?
Simon Conway-Morris: The definition of how everybody refers to nature. Actually when you decide what it is, and especially if you look historically, I think that Partha was much better informed about this area in particular which has changed almost continuously.
I’m quite sure one can make a whole set of wrong decisions and end up with a deeply impoverished planet and that’s what we’re doing at the moment: it’s not that we’re making any right decisions. But then linked to that – and I’ll probably be a little bit unpopular here – I think also the very mantra of sustainability is a fiction. It doesn’t exist. It’s merely an excuse, I’m afraid, and again it’s not to say that there aren’t serious problems, that we are responsible for them and nobody else is going to bail us out of our predicament. But I think actually, when we see most things we have in common with other animals in rather sophisticated ways – and you were very gently dismissive about chimp-culture, and so you should be, because it’s extremely boring – but all the elements which define us are there and I don’t think it’s simply that they are exaggerated. In the end I’m quite hard pushed to really find out what the difference is, other than with language and the complexity which we’ve built around ourselves.
Holmes Rolston: No – in animals there is a first order intentionality but there’s no second-order intentionality. A tree has zero order intentionality, a tree does not have intentions. An animal like a dog that barks at you when you come near its lodging has first-order intentionality. The dog intends to change your behaviour and does so quite successfully. The dog does not have second-order intentionality. The dog does not intend to change your mind as distinct from normal behaviour.
Simon Conway-Morris: That’s true of dogs but not true of other animals.
Holmes Rolston: And humans have clearly second-order, third-order, fourth-order intentionality, we can iterate intentionality. I am trying to change your mind this evening – you knew that I was trying to change your mind. This idea of ideas passing from mind to mind to mind being critically evaluated on which language depends is not present in the animal world. There are suggestions here and there of an animal theory of mind but they’re pretty weak and certainly no animals have cumulative transmissible cultures which depend on the transmission of ideas and the evaluation of ideas from mind to mind to mind. That’s instinctively human and that makes culture.
Simon Conway-Morris: It does indeed. I think actually, as it happens, one animal knowing what another animal is thinking about a third animal is now well established. What interests me, and I think theologically this is important because part of the discussion is to do with that, is you end up with a planet you can trash. Clearly, and I think everyone around this table would agree, that what we’re doing at the moment is wrong, actually I think deeply wrong, as it so happens; but Derek, for instance, might have a different view about how we might take things forward.
What actually matters very much, because as I was asked a question by Brian in terms of the evolutionary perspective, my own area, and obviously I am biased because I am obsessed with it at the moment, is that in some sense by ignoring that aspect of our animality which is otherwise mostly produced in areas of pop-evolutionary psychology – and that’s not what I’m talking about – we’re actually missing a large part of trying to rescue our own position within nature as you then wish to define it. So it’s not that I disagree with anything you say about dogs or anything else, but I think in the end my view is that, and of course there would be a Christian perspective on this rather predictably, unless you have a complete paradigm shift, complete, then whatever you do will keep on making the same set of mistakes and you’ll just keep on reinventing those mistakes. You can see this particularly in a historical tradition where there they are by another sacked city saying, “Oh, it’s happened again”.
The difference now, though, is that partly due to environmental changes there is reasonably clear evidence, and the case in point always uses Easter Island as you mention about sustainability of the oceans, you might end up where there are no fish, not just some fish left, but no fish worth fishing. That seems to be still improbable in our protected area here but some people I think are a sight more cautious about other things. People may start to move in large numbers, which has happened in the past; and someone mentioned that the Ethiopians want to take water from the Nile, which of course means people further north in Egypt have a view on this which is not exactly constructive – and Partha is aware of all these particular local difficulties. When all these things are taken into account, I think you will find you end up with a whole set of problems which are occurring on a miniature scale now but which will become very much more serious and we’ll have no way of finding any way out of it other than exacerbating the problems which we’ve gone through again and again.
It’s an easy thing to say but in the end I think it goes down to a very deep-seated assumption, which I think we’re very much in sympathy with, and I must say I disagree entirely with Partha with regard to “Well it’s so many bits of whale meat”. Of course that’s an argument you can use but it’s an argument that I think will end up destroying you if you ask what are your equivalents, because in the end those economic arguments, which I think someone else was saying, that although they are correct and apply, will not actually persuade people to act in a different way. As you know better than I do, Partha, there are far more complexities in this. If you look at the way the Russians behaved with their whaling it was astonishing what they did, astonishing.
Holmes Rolston: We might say that about the oceans. Given the long history of speciation on land, now that modern humans are here, in parts of the landscape we’ve shut down speciation on land. But I don’t know that we have to shut down speciation in the oceans. That could be one of your maxims for environmental ethics: Shut down the speciating processes we’ve gone too far.
Partha Dasgupta: I think there has been a serious misunderstanding of what I was saying. I was saying that there plenty of cases where preserving a species is the recommended course of action even when the species is valued solely for the commercial profits it generates. This is worth knowing because you don't then need to wring your hands and go to the ethicist to ask what arguments he could come up with for the
species' preservation: you have already provided the argument for preservation that would convince even
hardboiled, profit-seeking people! That's the advantage of working with biased models. The real sweat arises when a species is found not to be worth preserving on commercial grounds. Then we have to invoke its intrinsic worth if we are to advocate its preservation. That's why environmental economists go round finding ways to determine how people actually feel about preservation (how much they are willing to pay for preservation), rather than rely on people's behaviour as an indicator of their true feeling.
Susan Owens: How do you know that preservation is what you want?
Partha Dasgupta: Because if preservation is recommended on solely commercial grounds, then preservation would surely be recommended if intrinsic worth were added to the species' commercial worth. That's the great merit of working with biased viewpoints.
Susan Owens: You are talking as if that’s the right answer.
Partha Dasgupta: Yes, because of the reason I have just given you. The real sweat would arise if a species were found not to be worth preserving on commercial grounds. Then the case for preservation could only be made if additional worth were imputed to the species. That's where ethicists could come in, if they had something more solid to say than that we should respect the integrity of the species.
Simon Conway-Morris: Those arguments are all entirely rational and entirely believable but the rule of thumb seems to be in the first approximation they don’t work. I think it’s unfortunate in the way one chooses whales, although one should because they are highly intelligent and different from us in many respects - but very important to us for reasons deep down which we might find difficult to articulate. Then go to all the general questions, which again you’re much better informed about but we can all take our favourite examples, you know fisheries being referred to, various agricultural policies going on in the west as a whole. There too I think we all agree there are complications. But as we all know, if you decide to change certain arrangements even by a small percentage, in a nearby country separated from us by about twenty-two miles of water, their streets are full of tractors and there is a whole culture there which regards this behaviour as part of the acceptable dialogue. But it’s not a dialogue at all, there’s no dialogue at all – it’s an unsustained system and it will probably be much worse in twenty years time but by then a whole lot of other things in terms of climate will have changed. I think we can all panic ourselves to death about that too but it may all work out. I should say in parenthesis I was reviewing a manuscript by a character called Bird who points out that in terms of the general environment, the last ten thousand years have been astonishingly stable compared to the enormous oscillations that occurred in the last two million years, before it was yo-yoing and it’s not quite a straight line. Bob in particular will know that actually there are complications in that. What it says is that one possibility, actually the human involvement, especially with early farming, production of methane, these famous cattle feeding on tigers or vice-versa as the case might be, and rice growing and so forth and he actually said let’s think about this a little more seriously and say that if we want a stable environment to keep us going as long as possible, maybe we should start chopping down rain forests like there’s no tomorrow. Maybe we should start growing deserts, because after all that’s the way we’ve been doing it for the last five thousand years. So again it’s very, very easy to get yourself locked into this huggy-fuggy sense that things are this way because we want them to be. But actually there’s almost no coherence in these arguments at all because there’s almost no scientific data.
Brian Ford: I did light-heartedly publish the views some years ago – perhaps I shouldn’t have done it so light-heartedly – that mankind was God’s creation of an organism wise enough to be able to liberate the carbon trapped in fossil fuels, thus putting the C0 2 back into the atmosphere where it rightly belonged. The earth could then revert to being much warmer than it is at the present time, and which it has been for some 70 per cent of its existence so far.
I did want to say something, too, on the notion that learning and teaching is unique to humans. In my view, animals can surely learn too. One example: I think it was in the spring of 1948 that a blue tit in Portsmouth discovered how to peck through the aluminium top of a milk bottle and within twenty years, all the blue tits in Britain had learned how to do it.
Similarly, I have recently been told that near Brynmawr in South Wales a few years ago a sheep discovered how to cheat the cattle grid by rolling over it instead of walking across, and rolled across one several times. Meanwhile, gangs of sheep, I beg their pardon, herds of sheep, I mean flocks of sheep (that was dangerously un-Biblical of me, I’m sorry!), clustered round to benefit from this behaviour, in order to learn how to do it.
Holmes Rolston: No, no, these animals don’t teach, they imitate behaviour. The tits watched other tits peck the tops and learnt how to do it. The sheep watched other sheep roll over and learn how to do it. If a monkey doesn’t see it, a monkey doesn’t know it.
Brian Ford: But take also communication between plants, such as trees. In a forest environment, if a species of tree in the north-western corner of a forest is infected with a pathogen, then trees in the south-eastern corner can be synthesizing chemicals that will act against the pathogen long before the pathogen itself has reached them. I believe that this can happen within twenty-four hours, if it’s a small wood. This is because of the transmission of information through the microrhizza and the roots.
I truly believe that all organisms have a degree of cognition and communication that may seem muted, compared to ours, but which is appropriate for their function in life. Of course I see our abilities as extreme, though I don’t see ourselves as entirely unique.
Brian Heap: Nian is doing a study on forests.
Nian Zhang: As to the valuation of the forest, if we go back to the policy we heard I have one question. I may be very naïve. Shall we just attach different values to the forests in different regions? If we attach the value to the forest we would make policy based on the valuation. In China it would cost much less to compensate people to keep a forest and stop logging. In the UK I think maybe we might have to give people more money to induce them to do a similar kind of thing. So, should we attach different values to forests in different places?
Holmes Rolston: The mistake is treating forest as nothing but commodity. Forests are not correctly understood until they’re treated as communities.
Brian Heap: Let’s bring in some of our philosophers who’ve been very quiet so far.
David Bridges: I was interested to observe in your lecture your constant juxtaposing of different discourses to describe the same phenomena. You never actually gave us any particular reasons why we might prefer one discourse to another, but it was pretty clear which one you preferred yourself, though I think you sought to persuade us through seduction rather than argument!
I am trying to sort out in my mind the nature of the arguments going on here. At one extreme you can view the sanctity of life on the planet as a categorical imperative, as a requirement, admitting in the ordinary way of things, no concessions. I don’t know a lot about them but I believe the Jains are an example of a religious sect that seeks to avoid trampling on insects and so on because it wishes to regard all living creatures as sacred in that way. There is a kind of consistency in that even if it presents us with some difficulties in daily living. There are, then, moments in this conversation when that duty towards the living world starts to sound like a categorical imperative. But there are other points in the conversation where the whole argument is simply a utilitarian trade-off: human beings can use nature as they see fit but they’d better be sensible about it because they will soon destroy the resources from which they could, if they handle them more responsibly, benefit infinitely indefinitely into the future. These are two very different arguments, and I am not clear which one you are offering.
Then you have also invoked what sounds like a kind of hierarchical order of nature with we humans at the top and then a kind of descending order which bestows different rights and different responsibilities on creatures at different points on this hierarchy, and this starts to present quite a complex picture of the rights to exploit as well as the obligations to care within that order.
I can see the consistency of that awe and respect which says that we as human beings must not knowingly or willingly destroy any of these living creatures. However, the moment you move away from that and say, well yes you can destroy under these conditions and those conditions, the argument gets not only much more complicated but I’m not quite sure how you would defend it all. I’m not quite sure where you locate yourself on this spectrum of argument.
Holmes Rolston: Well you have to optimize values on earth. Maybe that’s an economist’s term. You may find that there occasions in which nature has to be sacrificed to human interest and welfare.
David Bridges : OK, so that is going down the utilitarian trail, but how would you justify that sacrifice of other living creatures to human self-interest?
Holmes Rolston: There needs to be some argument that you are going to leave the world richer in value than was the case before. So if you are trying to decide to tear up this wild area in order to build a new shopping centre then I would want to know what’s in most short supply in the UK , places to buy bread or places to see osprey.
David Bridges: That’s starting to go down the utilitarian trail.
Holmes Rolston: You would have a richer quality of life, a sense not simply of treating your environment as a commodity but treating it as a community; a sense not simply of maximum exploitation, as an economist might say, but a sense of being a resident at home on earth. Maximise that and you have a richer quality of life.
Terry McLaughlin: Just two quick rather different points. The criticisms of post-mortem survival or heaven depend on that being seen as a kind of endless duration so that you have the problems that you and our colleague here mentioned. But if you saw it as a kind of eternal now, which is a very mainstream way of thinking rather than endless duration, those wouldn’t be problems.
The second thing is the extent to which nature is really boring from the point of view of Christian theology because all you can get out of it is something very general, mainly the sort of teleological sort of intimations that it brought out and the awe and the reverence that are fully general. But when you begin to try to make Christian correlates with these things the clinching of the correlates becomes very difficult because all that’s interesting and distinctive in Christian theology – it’s the point that Bob White made in the questions after the lecture – is to do with human motivation, intentionality, reaction, the anthropological thing. So your reference to cruelty in the world is that it might be argued there’s no cruelty amongst animals, but rather the natural outlay of things that are happening. But in any case what’s the interesting Christian claim about that is the need for redemption as the result of some sin or something like this. So the second point is really can you clinch the Christian correlates into nature?
Holmes Rolston: Do you think that is the general tone of the story in Genesis when God makes these creatures over a series of six days? As the action goes along God says “Ho hum another day” and when day six comes God wakes up and says “Ha, now we’ve got something interesting”. I think the tone of the Genesis story is that this earth is a rich and good creation. God said bring forth the swarms of creatures, don’t you remember when the covenant was renewed in the day of Noah, the covenant is with the creatures. Didn’t God want to save all these creatures on the Ark while people were dying in the flood? Noah’s ark is the first endangered species right there. It looks to me like the Bible has got a lot of interest in the nonhuman creatures. Didn’t Jesus look around and say “Don’t look at Solomon’s palace, just look at these wild flowers in the field”.
I don’t think the bible teaches that nothing is interesting except what happens to human beings. Now it’s true the bible is a religion for people, wild flowers don’t need to be saved. In that sense that action of the Bible, that sort of redemption from sin, that’s for people and not for the birds of the field, so you’re correct about that. I’m not trying to do the whole of theology in a talk like the one this evening, I’m just trying to say that theology ought not to be to think that nothing but human activity is worthwhile on this planet.
Brian Heap: I think that’s a good note to draw to a close because we usually try to finish at ten.
One of the things that many of you may not know because I didn’t put it into the notes is that Holmes Rolston is also a Presbyterian minister and that in addition to the ecological area that he covers in philosophy and his thinking in environmental issues, there is this other dimension to his life as well.
We are immensely grateful to you for coming again to the Templeton Foundation this evening and you and your wife Jane too to be with us this evening. It’s been a great pleasure and thank you very much for the time you’ve spent with us.
Holmes Rolston: Don’t forget you have a Templeton prizewinner and you have a marvellous book by Simon Conway-Morris which everybody at this table ought to read.
Brian Heap: Before we go John although you didn’t put your hand up I expect you’re bursting with ideas. Do you want to have the last word?
John Polkinghorne: I think my last word would be that, while physics in many ways is impressed with the order of the universe and with its fruitfully evolving history, it does say that ultimately all carbon-based life will come to an end. Whatever view we have about the significance of the world has to take that fact into account in some way or another, and that is why I personally am very interested in eschatology.
Who’s Who
Professor Holmes Rolston Templeton Prizewinner 2003, distinguished lecturer worldwide, six books amd chapters in eighty others, over one hundred articles, founder of environmental ethics, features in Fifty Key Environmental Thinkers
Dr Denis Alexander Fellow St Edmund’s, Chairman of Molecular Immunology Programme, Babraham Institute, Cambridge , editor of Science and Christian Belief
Dr Andrew J Blaza Principal Research Fellow, Business & Environment at Imperial College London in the Faculty of Life Sciences, UK leader in sustainability studies
Professor David Bridges Fellow St Edmund’s, Chair of Von Hügel Institute (VHI), Executive Director Association of Universities in the East of England, former Pro-Vice Chancellor University of East Anglia
Professor Derek Burke Hon Fellow St Edmund’s, molecular biologist, broadcaster on new technologies including GM crops, government adviser, former Vice-Chancellor University of East Anglia.
Mr Jack Cassidy Chief Executive RJH Public Relations London , PR for Templeton Foundation and many distinguished organisations and individuals
Dr Flavio Comim Fellow St Edmund’s, College Teaching Officer, economist, Director of Capability and Sustainability Centre in the VHI
Professor Simon Conway Morris FRS Professor of Evolutionary Palaeobiology, Royal Institution Christmas Lectures on BBC, latest book Life’s Solution widely acclaimed as an antidote to Dawkins
Rev Dr Geoffrey Cook Vice-Master St Edmund’s, research cell biologist and biochemist, funded by Medical Research Council, wide experience in ecumenism
Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta FBA Professor of Economics, Foreign Associate US National Academy of Sciences, Member of Pontifical Academy, Foreign member Swedish Academy of Sciences, Past President Royal Economic Society, author of several books including Human Well-being and the Natural Environment
Mr Brian J Ford biologist, author of 30 books (100 editions), broadcaster, started BBC’s Science Now, Cardiff University and Cambridge Society of the Application of Science
Dr Ray Gambell biologist, world expert on whaling, member of Christians in Science
Professor Peter Guthrie Fellow St Edmund’s, Professor of Engineering for Sustainable Development, Engineering Department, civil engineer, wide experience overseas
Kirsten Hagon St Edmund’s student from Australia, candidate for LLM, founder member of Environment Society at St Edmund’s
Professor Sir Brian Heap FRS Master St Edmund’s, biologist, Advisor European Board of Templeton Foundation, member Capability and Sustainability Centre (VHI)
Dr Susan Owens Reader in Environment and Policy, Fellow Newnham College, studies environmental issues and policies in UK and Europe, land use and environmental sustainability
Rev Dr John Polkinghorne KBE FRS Templeton Prizewinner 2002, former Professor of Mathematical Physics, former President of Queens’ College, Anglican priest, author of many books
Professor Wilson Poon Visiting Fellow St Edmund’s, Professor of Condensed Matter Physics University of Edinburgh, Peterhouse graduate, former Visiting Scholar St Edmund’s
Mrs Holmes Rolston
Dr Steve Trudgill Senior Lecturer, Department of Geography, Fellow of Robinson College, research into environment and conservation’ ecological values
Professor Bob White FRS Fellow St Edmund’s, Professor of Geophysics, research into crustal structure of the Earth, earthquakes and volcanoes, co-author with Denis Alexander Beyond Belief:Science, faith and ethical challenges
Nian Zhang St Edmund’s MPhil student of environmental policy in Department of Land Economy, dissertation on valuing nature especially forests
