Beauty Alone Justifies Conservation

He comes close to saying it, but something stops him. People too, and the peoples they are a part of, are also a part of nature in the positive sense of things. Are they not also worth preserving, or is it only the proles and animals that are free with those who promote the ideology of Multi-Culturalism?

Natural aesthetes

Forget about usefulness, beauty alone is reason enough to justify conservation

George Monbiot
Tuesday January 13, 2004
The Guardian

Last week, the journal Nature published a report suggesting that, by 2050, around a quarter of the world’s animal and plant species could die out as a result of global warming. To these we must add the millions threatened by farming, logging, hunting, fishing and introduced species. The future is beginning to look a little lonely.

Does it matter? To most of those who govern us, plainly not. To most of the rest of us, the answer seems to be yes, but we are not quite sure why. We have little difficulty in recognising the importance of other environmental issues. Climate change causes droughts and floods, ozone depletion gives us skin cancer, diesel pollution damages our lungs. But, while most people feel that purging the world of its diversity of animals and plants is somehow wrong, the feeling precedes a rational explanation. For the past 30 years, the conservation movement has been trying to provide one. Its efforts have, for the most part, failed…

Biodiversity, in other words, matters because it matters. If we are to protect wildlife, we must do it for ourselves. We need not pretend that anything else is bidding us to do so. We need not pretend that anyone depends upon the king protea or the golden toad or the silky sifaka for their survival. But we can say that, as far as we are concerned, the world would be a poorer place without them.

Link to full article

Posted by Alex on Wednesday, January 27, 2010 at 02:18 PM in
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Comments:

Posted by James Bowery on January 27, 2010, 03:57 PM | #

I agree. Moreover, we should also be quite concerned about preserving this kind of beauty before it is despoiled:

Posted by Guessedworker on January 27, 2010, 04:00 PM | #

That, surely, is the despoilation, James.

This is the beauty:

Posted by James Bowery on January 27, 2010, 04:07 PM | #

Actually, I am more concerned about the despoilage that takes the form of childlessness or of this:

But your point is well taken.

Posted by Guessedworker on January 27, 2010, 04:40 PM | #

But to prevent that, you have to speak to the parent of the child that became the parent of the child. It takes time, and it ends in knowing who and what we truly are, and who and what the Other is.

Posted by cladrastis on January 28, 2010, 09:11 PM | #

Aesthetics AND a sense of the numinous. That’s reason enough for me.

Posted by James Bowery on January 30, 2010, 09:57 AM | #

To get back on track regarding the Rhinegold after briefly digressing to discuss the plight of the Rhinemadens:

The problem, of course, is agricultural land use. You aren’t going to support anything close to the existing world’s population on hunting and gathering.

If you could “magically” produce all the food people needed to eat, people could find ways of, say, building tree houses suspended around the lower trunks of living trees with zero impact on the scenic beauty shown above. You would need other adjustments as well, but there is no reason that people would have to squeeze themselves into cities, let alone go through a Malthusian collapse that destroyed nature.

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