Nature, Art, and the Question of Environmental Value

A central question uniting environmental aesthetics and environmental ethics is whether the value found in natural entities and systems is objective — a property of ecosystems discoverable through inquiry — or is instead entirely a matter of human appraisal projected onto an otherwise valueless nature. Holmes Rolston III, in Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World (1988), argues for the objective position, holding that natural processes such as evolutionary adaptation, ecological interdependence, and even the capacity of organisms to pursue their own good give rise to values that exist independently of any human valuer, so that human aesthetic and ethical appreciation discovers, rather than simply invents, these values.