Conservation, ecological justice and harm to nature - Environmental Harm: An Eco-justice Perspective - page 69

water, and land degradation because otherwise the whole system will
be put into jeopardy. In the latter, the emphasis is on intrinsic values
and protection of nonhuman nature for its own sake. Both these
concepts may be apparent in contemporary discussions of ecological
wellbeing and health.
Specific practices, and choices, in how humans interact with
particular environments present immediate and potential risks to
everything within them. For example, the practice of clearfelling old
growth forests directly affects many animal species by destroying their
homes. Similarly, human practices that destroy, re-channel or pollute
existing fresh water systems have a negative impact on local natural
environments, and nonhuman inhabitants of both so-called wilderness
and built environments. If we pollute our rivers, streams and waterways,
we are not simply affecting human beings but also living creatures,
such as the platypus. When we destroy the habitat of the platypus, we
simultaneously destroy the biosphere.
Ecological notions of rights and justice see humans as only one component
of complex ecosystems that should be preserved for their own sake,
as expressed in the notion of the rights of the environment. As Smith
(1998: 99) puts it:
By extending the moral community we are attributing
intrinsic value to creatures and other natural things, as
ends in themselves rather than the means to some set
of human ends…In ethical terms, any set of moral rules
should consider these duties toward nonhuman animals,
the land, forests and woodland, the oceans, mountains and
the biosphere.
Translated into the language of rights, it has been argued by Berry (in
Cullinan, 2003: 115) that every component of the Earth Community
has three rights: 'The right to be, the right to habitat, and the right to
fulfil its role in the ever-renewing processes of the Earth Community.'
What this might concretly mean is difficult to assess, however, since
any decision about a particular environmental issue very much depends
upon situational factors, community norms and values, and available
technologies and techniques (see Chapter Five).
Even given the ambiguities of practice, what necessarily follows
from an ecological perspective are notions of interconnectedness and
human obligations to the nonhuman world around them. All living
things are bound together, and environmental matters are intrinsically
global and trans-boundary in nature (as witnessed, for example, by