Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
and populate the world.
127
He also argues that resilience is something
that we should value because it enables an ecosystem to maintain
its
creative force by maintaining its self-organizing, auto-poietic (literally
'
'
.
128
An ethical system that
self-making
'
)structure
'
nds ultimate value in ecological processes and
properties and in system-wide resilience would, if translated into a legal
system for ecological protection, have signi
cations for how
we use law to protect the environment. The focus in environmental law
hitherto has been either on assessing potential impacts on speci
cant rami
careas
(predominantly the location in which development will be conducted
and its vicinity) or on creating protected areas. However, a geographical
approach is not useful for drafting laws that are intended to re
ect values
held in dynamic events and their outcomes, which cannot be pinpointed
to a particular location but are the product of multiple interactions between
different ecological levels. Rather, such a valuation would require corre-
spondingly broad controls on our activities to prevent them from under-
mining the complex occurrences that produce and maintain ecological
functionality. We must match the importance of what happens at the
systemic level for our well-being with laws that regulate what we do at
the macro-level of policy formation.
One further issue we must consider in connection with valuation is the
basis on which we should value ecological processes, properties and
resilience. A revised perspective that is informed by a new understanding
of humanity
cient basis for an
anthropocentric ethic for ecological protection. In any event, I believe
that an attempt to form such an ethic through an intrinsic valuation of
ecosystems would encounter two dif
'
s place in nature would provide a suf
rst is that the basis
on which we value ecosystems is unavoidably anthropocentric. The
concepts that we use to indicate whether an ecosystem is in a desirable
state are intrinsically connected with whether it remains in a condition
that sustains us. In this regard, the very notion of maintaining resilience
is bound up with keeping ecosystems in states that we would regard as
'
culties. The
. Conversely, locating intrinsic value in ecological processes
would suggest that we should value them even if they operate to promote
a change in state which deprives us of the support that a
healthy
'
'
ecosystem delivers. Such a valuation would be far removed from the
'
healthy
127
B. G. Norton,
'
Biodiversity and environmental values: in search of a universal earth
ethic
'
(2000) 9 Biodiversity and Conservation,1039
-
40.
128
Ibid
., 1041.
