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Everything in this world has an order in which it should be. Everything also has significance in one way or another. These values, if you will, are in which our decisions come from. If it has a high value then it is worth taking notice of and worth doing something about. For so many years we (us humans) have placed a higher value on our selves than the value that comes from nature (wilderness) and we underestimate its worth. “Nature is a value producer,” Holmes Ralston Ill states in his essay “Environmental Ethics: Values in and duties to the Natural World” and he laces “systemic value” on it (p. 84).
Meaning that there is no value within itself, yet, it still produces value. The “laws of nature” are also at stake here when you start only looking at nature as more of a market place of monetary value then a rarity that gives us a way to live or more of a key to life. When you don’t let things do their Job (I. E. Plants consume Carbon Dioxide) and things go wrong, we need to change how we do things. Our ways, skills, and creations have all caused erosion to our ecosystem if we want to admit or not. We need to stop forgetting the little things, like bugs and insects, and think to ourselves that without them we wouldn’t be in existence.
Finally, science and our society need to solve “the problem of uncertainty’ as stated by Raglan Fecal (p. 35). If we don’t do something now (I. E. , by changing our ways and mentalities), we will do nothing but help commit our own environmental suicide. We know what the problem is but the way to solve it is to stop clear cutting our forest and start using more renewable sources and we need to stop underestimating the effects of our doings by “laboratory experiments” that Just fuels our ignorance. Values that we place on objects and things have had so many alterations since the beginning of humanity.
One thing that hasn’t ever changed though is the values an item has within itself. Like water, for example, has an extraordinary value because it doesn’t deprive anything from its goodness, it makes it flourish. In Relation’s theory’ he explores the face that nature doesn’t care about tragic or good events that happen within it (p. 85). It is “indifferent” to the things that make up what we call nature. Unlike mankind that places an extraordinary value of each individual within a society or culture and their possessions.
Yes, we love our homes and we love our objects that we acquire during the duration of life and it changes our whole view of looking at things when something happens to them. The fact still remains, though, even if nature doesn’t care what happens within it, we should place a higher value than we have been in order to maintain the balance of ecosystem (All the environments and organisms on earth). If life is the highest premium on earth, then shouldn’t we do our best to conserve it by not letting ourselves take away what is keeping us alive?
The answer is within us. Earlier I talked about alterations; well the views of the past didn’t think nature was really much of anything. It was for us to conquer and develop. Times have changed now since we have realized that without a healthy ecosystem to support us, disasters things could and will happen. Natural law is denned as “the doctrine that human tartars should be govern De by ethical principles that are part of the very nature of things and that can be understood by reason… ” (Dictionary).
In translation, “laws of nature” stressed by James Reaches is what things are and “ought to be” and that anything that does monetary to what it is meant to do is not a very good thing (I. E. , the ice reflecting the heat of the sun to preserve an ideal global temperature or something more profound like our organs keeping us alive) (p. 61). The basis of this very assumption is when in nature we don’t leave things alone and we start making dramatic changes without a conservative moderation, ecosystems tend to fail.
For example, look at what we’ve done by clear cutting timberland by rivers and watersheds; we have annihilated the salmon and other marine life in most of those areas Just by taking away the trees that ere shading the water that stopped it from evaporating. Now the water levels of these watersheds are so low that they cannot even sustain any form of life. The Native American’s view is another important view point that we must come to grip with. In her article Noises from White Earth,” Winnow Allude says that her people believe that it is a violation of natural law if you “take more then you need” (c. . , p. 248). Why we might ask do we care about balance or “usualness” between us and nature, and why would it be a violation if it wasn’t maintained? The reasons why aren’t very apparent at first glance or even later down the road but the whole idea of “living in harmony with nature” is important because if “greed,” has she calls it, “imbalances” the cycle there wouldn’t be any guarantees that the resources they need would still be there, like the clear-cutting of trees.
Taking a look at how we have been doing things in the past and in the present, the marine life that used to be in the ocean and the rivers have exponentially decreased due to over fishing. Greed is the source of all evil and the source of our failure in respect to maintaining our lobar ecosystem. We need to restore the equilibrium between man and nature to balance out the effects of our doings (I. E. , rising carbon dioxide levels and temperatures because of pollution and clear cutting) by increasing energy efficiency through renewable meaner and lowering our oil consumption.
In his essay “The Little things that run the World,” Edward O. Wilson asserts that “the world would do Just finely if all were to disappear. ” (c. F. , p. 46) This is amazingly true because all we do is try to change things and make things our way no matter how destructive it is. Invertebrates” out number us, this is a fact, and they have been here way longer then we have. The key reason I bring this point up is because all “invertebrates” do is explore the world in which they live in and make do the best they can. They maintain a social structure (I. E. , an ant hill) and they do it by not uprooting the environment. The truth is we need invertebrates but they don’t need us” this point exactly should put something in our minds that the way we’ve been thinking is wrong (Wilson, p. 47). We forget about little things like “invertebrates” that are responsible for our very existence. We couldn’t be here without them; we couldn’t do the work that they do. Wilson stresses this point all through out his essay and he sums it up by saying as a key point, “it needs to be repeatedly stressed that invertebrates as a whole are even more important in the maintenance of ecosystems than are vertebrates” (c. T. , p. 8) Meaning it we don’t take care tot them and make sure that all “invertebrate” specie flourish we will have even more of a problem on our hands. Problems often arise from the uncertainty of most sciences also. For instance, Fusillade asserts that “laboratory experiments” often fool us because we try o maintain total control over a system that isn’t controllable and we try to factor in the other conditions. But what we don’t seem to notice is that the result ends up skewed because in a “natural system” there are several uncontrollable factors leading to the point of “risk assessment. “When we have uncertainty, it meaner that we know what can go wrong… However, there are often situations where we have no idea of what can go wrong. These situations are characterized by ignorance “the consequence of all of that we tend to follow the path of “insurability,” we will not accept something that we cannot describe in a mathematical way (c. F. , p. 36). “According to Galileo, “the book of nature” is written in the language of mathematics” meaning that the only things we take seriously are numbers (p. 5). We find ways to calculate the carbon dioxide levels in a closed and open system but can’t predict how much fossil fuel usage will raise the world’s ecosystem carbon levels as we keep letting them rise more and more, hence, the “problem of uncertainty. ” So what do we make out of all of that, “If we don’t change, tragic things will come? ” I’m not sure UT I do know that if we don’t change our ways and if we don’t change our mentalities, there will be a problem which will be literally bigger than ourselves.
We can win a battle and we can win a war, yet, we cannot fight our own environmental suicide. We refuse to put the natural laws in our contemporary beliefs and ethics which have landed us on the dark side of the coin. We put our selves at the mercy of our planet’s ecosystem when we destroy things or clear-cut wooded areas that have been serving this earth for its purpose to maintain itself, which deprives the very dead of restoration. The concept of saving “invertebrates” is oblivious to us because we take for granted the very things that give us life.
Thus, through our own damned uncertainty about a lot of “natural systems” we are unable to come up with a realistic idea how to save what we got because we do not know a lot of things because of ignorance. But if we stop clear cutting and switch to renewable energies and grow more trees than we kill, only then we will start clearing this planet of carbon dioxide and make this planet and its ecosystem livable by all creatures including us.