Boulders and Native Prairie:  A Stewardship Ethic of Interests

Bruce R. Reichenbach, Professor, Department of Philosophy, Augsburg College

The latest craze in urban landscape aesthetics is boulders – not just any boulders, but the big, rounded glacial remains that make strong walls, visible artistic pronouncements, or the proper setting for wild flower and prairie gardens.  Where once 18 million acres of prairie spread across Minnesota, less that 150,000 acres remain, most still in private hands.  Here the prairie has been preserved because the prevalence of glacial boulders made it unprofitable to farm.  But the demand for glacial boulders has begun to alter the landscape, as farmers clear their prairie parcels by selling the boulders for profit.  Removal of the rocks leaves behind gaping backhoe holes and rutted landscapes that either make room for non-native plants to edge out the prairie grasses or open the now-tillable land for the farmer’s plow.  In effect, the beauty and ecology of the rural prairie is exchanged for cultivated urban wildflower aesthetics. ^[1]

The Ethic of Stewardship

             The story of the rocks and prairie takes us to our broader concern:  what moral obligations do we have to the environment?   To answer this I will apply an ethical model of stewardship to environmental considerations.  My stewardship ethic is rooted in Genesis 1 and 2, whose theme emphasizes that God created humans to represent his kingdom interests. ^[2]   To these stewards God gives three injunctions by which they are to perform their administrative functions.  On behalf of the Landowner they are to fill, rule over, and tend the earth. ^[3]    Let us begin with the injunction to rule over.

   The Ethic of Stewardship:  Ruling

Many have misconstrued the injunction to rule over as a sanction for human selfishness and rapaciousness.  If we are to rule the land, the environment serves a utilitarian function for human fulfillment.  So, it is said, we should be about the business of getting from it the most that we can. 

             This anthropologically-centered, utilitarian calculation is superficial, though not unimportant.  To develop a true stewardship environmental ethic, we must go beyond considering the environment as a mere instrument for the realization of human happiness and well-being.  We thus distinguish between an ethic of environmental management and an environmental stewardship ethic.  In a management ethic the environment is treated strictly as an instrument to maximize human well-being, both short- and long-term.  Since the environment is a means, possessing no moral standing in its own right as part of the end for whose good we act, actions are not assessed morally in terms of how they affect the environment.  Consequently, the environment's moral position wavers precariously, depending on how humans determine its potential for human use. 

            In an environmental stewardship ethic, however, the environment and its contents possess moral standing (possess moral worth independent of being means to another's good).  As such, at times the environment and its contents will be part of the "for whom" aspect of moral calculation.  Actions and effects will be weighed not solely in terms of human advantage and satisfaction, but also from the perspective of things in the environment that have moral standing.  Actions will tend toward being good if propitious for them, bad if unpropitious.  (I say "tend toward" because, as we shall see shortly, human interests and other prima facie obligations must also be considered in deciding the morality of an action that affects the environment.) 

Something has moral standing if it deserves moral consideration.  It is frequently noted that we can determine which things have moral standing by noting what can have interests.  However, "having interests" is an ambiguous phrase.  One can have interests in the sense of being able to take an interest in things.  I have an interest in my house because I have wants or desires with regard to it that I attempt to satisfy.  Understood in this sense, having interests is a feature only of conscious beings, and perhaps only of self-conscious beings capable of forming beliefs.  The emphasis on beliefs arises because to desire something requires that desirers have beliefs both about what they want and how to attain it.  This sense of interest provides an important feature in considering the scope of our moral actions.  But at most this sense of interest constitutes a sufficient, not a necessary, condition for ascribing moral standing; that is, if something self-consciously entertains beliefs, this means that we must give it moral standing.  However, being able to take an interest does not appear to constitute a necessary condition for possessing moral value.  For example, we consider neonatal infants as having moral standing even though they have no conscious awareness of what is in their interest and apparently can entertain no beliefs.  One might reply that we ascribe to them moral standing because they have the potentiality for conscious awareness.  However, we also give moral standing to comatose patients for whom no such prospects loom when we consider it immoral to abuse or mistreat them.

                Accordingly, "taking an interest in" is not the sense of having interests we use to ascribe moral standing.  Rather, we employ "having interests" in our environmental stewardship ethic in the sense of being able to be benefited or harmed. ^[4]    What has interests can be improved or ruined by acting on it, though it need not be conscious of what is done.  For example, just as we say that a neonatal infant has interests that must be protected because the infant can be benefited by taking action regarding it (for example, surgery), so a tree can be benefited by, for example, removing strangling mistletoe (it goes without saying that the mistletoe is not benefited).  Though neither infant nor tree is aware of nor can consciously appreciate the beneficial action, each is benefited.  The benefit can only be appreciated consciously by an observer or proxy for that being.

            These two senses of having an interest are obviously independent.  The interests we take (what we desire) might not in fact be in our best interests (as when a child desires to touch a hot stove).  Similarly, what is in our best interests might not be what we desire (as when someone recommends that we stop smoking).  And nonconscious things can have interests (can be benefited or harmed) quite apart from their realizing it or taking an interest.

             Though most (if not all) things in a given environment do not have interests in the first sense (if having desires requires beliefs), many things can have interests in the second sense.  For example, pruning a tree can benefit us because it makes the tree more productive; but the removal of dead or diseased limbs also keeps it healthy.  Even particular ecosystems can have moral standing, insofar as actions can be taken to benefit or harm them.  In short, humans are not the only things for which there are objective goods.  Since actions can be taken for things in the environment that make life for them better or worse, they have moral standing and must be taken into account in making relevant moral decisions.  

Unfortunately, moral appeals for restraining the rapaciousness by which we subdue or rule over the earth often are based on little more than management ethics.  We are told not to destroy forests because then future generations will be deprived of their use or suffer impoverished aesthetics.  But mere utilitarian appeals run counter to our stewardship ethic.  Ruling or subduing has to be done not only for the benefit of the Landlord and human beings but also for what is ruled.  When we consider the ruled as an essential part of the stewardship ethic, we concede that its interests must be taken into account when making moral evaluations.   

Why Worry about Interests?

            It might be asked why we should worry about the interests of plants, animals, and ecosystems.  Only some of the ruled are conscious, and whether they are self-conscious and can appreciate the goods in which they have an interest is disputed. 

Nontheists have difficulty establishing why things in nature should be treated as having moral standing, as having a value other than as a means to something else's good.  One response is that things have moral standing because we give them moral standing.  But this hardly will do, since without any objective grounds such attribution is open to the grossest arbitrariness.  We can give moral standing to and (often perversely) withhold it from whatever we like.

            A second, more reasoned response affirms that things in nature have moral standing because they possess certain properties.  But what properties must something possess for it to have moral standing?  Often it is charged that human egocentrism underlies any proposed list.  Things have moral standing only if they have properties like those I possess and give me moral standing.  Suppose one suggests that to have moral standing something must be capable of being self-conscious, appreciating and taking reasoned action to achieve its interests, and evaluating whether these interests are attained.  On these criteria, only humans would have moral standing.  Animal rights activists, however, accuse those who make rational consciousness a necessary condition for moral standing of "speciesism." ^[5]   They suggest that only beings that are conscious can have moral standing, since only they can act to achieve or avoid what is in their interests.  Plant-rights activists in turn accuse this view of "sentientism;" ^[6] what gives something moral standing, they argue, is the fact that it is alive.  But perhaps this last view smacks of "vitalism" in overlooking the moral standing of inanimate nature, of the land itself; some argue for a "land-ethic."  Beyond the ad hominem, the problem is to isolate the properties relevant to moral standing and to justify their selection.  The appeal to rational consciousness seems to have merit because the establishment of values requires a valuer, and only rational beings can take an interest in and hence value what is good for them.  But we already have argued that a stewardship environmental ethic appeals to the weaker sense of "having interests," that is, of being benefited by actions.  Only if the stronger sense of "having interests" is used can rationality provide the criterion for ascribing moral standing.

            Others suggest that moral standing is determined in terms of inherent goodness. ^[7]   But why, it might be asked, is something inherently good?  Proponents of this view admit they have no satisfactory reply. ^[8]   If x is inherently good but not y, there must be something about x that gives it its inherent goodness.  But such an approach reduces inherent goodness to the previous position, namely, that some property makes x good, and consequently falls prey to the same objections. 

            One advantage of our ethical paradigm is that it provides a basis for moral standing.  Christians argue that neither humans nor nature is inherently good.  Value or worth is neither inherent in creation nor merely utilitarian.  Value or worth -- moral standing -- is connected to God.  Something is good because God, who is the ground of values, values it.  In the first Genesis creation account God looks at creation and sees it is good.  Indeed, everything is very good.  The text gives no hint that these things are good only for humans, for God's determinations of goodness primarily occur before God creates humans.  

                 However, the claim that things derive their value or moral standing from God is not unproblematic.  It reintroduces the ancient Socratic dilemma developed by Plato in his Euthyphro:  Is something good because God commands or determines it, or does God value it because it is good?  To opt for the former saddles us with divine arbitrariness, for if goodness or moral standing is determined by God's will alone, there is no basis for his valuation.  Indeed, there could not be; otherwise we would have invoked an autonomous principle of moral valuation.  To opt for the latter -- that God values something because it is good -- seems to return us to the problems noted above, namely, determining what properties provide for goodness or moral standing.

            Here the Genesis creation story provides some but not great help; it says that God saw something in creation that warranted calling it good, but it does not say what God saw.  One possible basis for God's ascription of goodness has to do with the functioning of the created world.  It is reasonable to claim that at the end of each creative period in the story, God saw creation's goodness in each thing performing a role or function within the economy of the creation.   

            It is important to note that this view of goodness differs from the above problematic account of goodness as a property.  "Goodness is not a property of things in the usual sense of property at all.  To say that a thing is good is not like saying that it is round or square, or pink or blue, or late or early, or above or below....  Instead, it seems to be what some ... call a consequential or supervenient property."  That is to say, it is a property a thing has in virtue of other properties that it possesses.  "The properties of a thing can be the sources of its goodness or value ... just insofar as they are properties that evidence the perfection or complete actuality of the thing in question." ^[9]   Goodness then is a supervenient property that a thing has insofar as it has realizes its potential or achieves its function.  In this sense goodness with respect to the environment is not arbitrary but grounded objectively in the teleological character of biological nature. 

            This view does not put goodness independent of God, for it is God who created objects with the particular functions they have in ecosystems.  Goodness is thus neither simply intrinsic to things nor completely autonomous of God.  The subjective element in determining goodness and moral standing arises from God’s seeing creation as good and valuing it insofar as creation functions according to his design and purposes.  Since he established the design and purpose, nature satisfies his desires.  At the same time, however, the account provides an objective ground for goodness insofar as the functions of things in nature are determinable.

            This account should not be taken to mean that organic functions cannot change or evolve over time, as the environment changes.  Creation need not be understood in a static way that precludes adaptation and change.  God's dynamic relation to nature is progressive. 

            To summarize our main argument, to develop a stewardship ethic that includes ruling requires that one consider not only the good or benefit of the rulers and the One on whose behalf they rule, but also the ruled, for the ruled, like the steward, has value bestowed on it.  The steward is to act in the interests of all three parties:  God, human beings, and nature.  It is illegitimate to appeal to the biblical injunction to subdue the earth to justify raping it.  Here we take issue with those who argue that Christianity commits one to holding that "God planned all of this explicitly for man's benefit and rule:  no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man's purposes....  Christianity ... insisted that it is God's will that man exploit nature for his proper ends." ^[10]   To the contrary, ruling is to take into account the interests of the Landlord, ruler, and ruled; hence mere exploitation on behalf of humans is immoral. 

The Ethic of Stewardship:  Caring For

According to the second Genesis story, God put the man in the royal garden to work and tend (care for) it.  The command to rule thus involves the injunction to care for or tend. 

             Some might think that from our contention that the ruled (namely, creation) has moral standing it follows that the best way to care for the environment is to leave it alone.  The environmentalist Tom Regan, for example, contends that if an object or thing has moral standing, then the proper attitude toward it should be respect.  "To treat it merely as a means to human ends is to mistreat it.  Such treatment shows a lack of respect for its being something that has value independently of these ends." ^[11]   This seems true enough. 

            But what follows from not treating something merely as a means to our own gratification?  Regan goes on to derive what he terms the "preservation principle," namely, that if we respect something then our approach to it should be "nondestruction, noninterference, and generally, nonmeddling." ^[12]   Regan does not claim that interference in nature is never justified, but interference cannot be justified simply in terms of human interests.

            One should be clear here.  He is not arguing that we should take steps to preserve each species or ecosystem.  To the contrary, the preservationist approach is that we not take steps at all, that we withdraw as much as possible from nature.  We are to tread so lightly on nature that we leave minimal imprints.  This preservationist approach is non-interference; nature and evolution are to resume their courses unimpeded by humans. ^[13]   Particular species and ecosystems will naturally disappear and evolve.  The catalyst, however, will not be human agency, but the very same agents that brought about the present ecological diversity.

Why should one think that non-interference rather than conservation devolves from the respect that we owe to things that have moral standing?  Our stewardship ethic considers the benefit for both the ruled (here, nature) and the steward.  Hence, though we are not to treat nature merely as a means for human satisfaction, nature can be treated as a means to benefit humans.       Utilitarian considerations are not triumphant, but they are relevant.

            When we introduce considerations related to caring for creation to benefit human beings, we find that merely leaving nature alone -- mere preservation -- is unjustified.  Rather, what follows is conservation, which involves a thoughtful balance between the preservation of nature and its resources, and the careful, appropriate use of the environment's resources for human benefit in ways that leave the environment ecologically sound, biologically diverse, and aesthetically pleasing. 

            One can give a pragmatic argument for conservation-minded intervention as opposed to mere non-interference.  Total bans on environmental intervention are ultimately unworkable.  Humans always have and will continue to impact their environment.  But mere unworkability should not determine our ethic.  The justification for our intervening in nature must derive from our obligation to benefit human beings as well as nature.  Since nature produces things that benefit humans, nature appropriately can and should be used for human benefit.  This might sound like the old utilitarian justification for exploitation, but it is not, for our use of nature must be accompanied by the respect for nature that derives from its moral standing.  Nature's resources must be harvested in a way that where they need not be tapped to meet basic human needs or where their extraction will cause irreparable harm to ecosystems, they are preserved; where they are tapped but restorable, they are restored; and where they are tapped but not restorable, they are used wisely and the place from where they are taken is restored either to its natural state or to some other aesthetically acceptable, productive use with its own sustainable ecosystems. 

             Conservation produces both immediate and long-term benefit.  It also functions to value nature, for it rules out destroying the environment merely for human benefit; it affirms that nature has moral standing, and hence the inroads we make on it should be as nondestructive of the ecosystems as possible.  This is not always possible.  To turn prairie into farmland will replace one ecosystem with another.  A conservator approach will find a place and role for both. 

While our stewardship ethic allows us to use nature to meet our needs, the imago Dei confers unique responsibility upon us.  We have the ability to alter the environment more drastically than any other organism.  Here conservation becomes an obligation.  In changing the world to benefit us, we must exercise the greatest care to conserve what exists, in terms of both individuals of various species and (more importantly) ecosystems. 

            Most importantly, the needs to which we appeal to justify environmental intervention must be genuine and substantial.  Mere profit does not qualify.  The use of nature as the means to satisfy human needs must be carried out with the highest respect paid to nature.  This means that neither human nor ecological interests can completely exclude the other, but though human interests might have preference, ways to create balance must be sought.  In short, we opt for a middle ground between mere non-interference (which treats all creation from an egalitarian perspective) and instrumentalism (which treats creation as a mere means to further human ends). 

The Ethic of Stewardship:  Filling

            Above we suggested we should preserve species.  One reason is that diversity has value .  This brings in the third stewardly injunction, to fill the land.  Although the concern in the Genesis accounts was quantitative in terms of producing mere numbers, there are other ways of looking at filling.  Here we suggest that filling can be seen from the qualitative perspective of diversity. 

                 Diversity benefits nature.  Diversity of species is important in an instrumental sense, for distinct species often contribute uniquely to the overall ecology.  Diversity within a species is also necessary for its survival.  Consequently, preserving species diversity is in the interest of and benefits the environment and its diverse organisms.

                 Diversity benefits humans as well.  The benefit might be physiological, for one-half of our pharmaceuticals have originated from wild plants.  We also can use the genetic resources of wild plant varieties to make our domesticated crops more disease resistant or productive.  But diversity also has a psychological benefit, insofar as it produces both aesthetic enjoyment and provokes the wonder that often occasions science.

            Some in the Western tradition have suggested that God desires diversity.  Thomas Aquinas argues that God, in loving himself, wants to see himself multiplied.  That is, since God is goodness itself, God wants goodness to be multiplied.  But there can only be one divine essence.  Consequently, the divine essence must be multiplied as best it can in the creation that is like or replicates God.  God, then, in loving himself and willing the good wills that the universe be diverse to manifest this goodness. ^[14]   This diversity is more than quantitative; as finite, each created thing can emulate God only in part, imperfectly.  How each thing emulates God depends on its particular nature or structure.  Hence, for God to have a creation that maximally emulates his goodness, there must be a diversity of types of things -- species, if you like. ^[15]   In short, from the very goodness of God the plenitude of species arises, each of which in some way emulates the divine.  Because it emulates the divine, showing forth his goodness, diversity of species is deemed good by God, and this in turn provides the basis for the moral standing that we have accorded creation.

            It would be presumptuous to suggest that God must have only one reason for creating diversity.  The reasons might be complex, including instrumental (diversity is necessary for nature to satisfy diverse human biological needs), ecological (diversity is necessary for development, stability, integrity, and success of organisms in their ecosystems), religious (diversity is part of the creation's testimony to the goodness and fullness of the creator), and aesthetic (diversity is necessary for beauty and human epistemic challenge) reasons.  Indeed, the diversity might provide for God's own aesthetic enjoyment. ^[16]

Conclusion

We are long past any opportunity for preservation of prairie land.  And the need to feed large numbers of individuals would make such an approach unacceptable.  At the same time, we are in a position to conserve what it left.  The removal of the rocks and destruction of prairie ecology relates not to needs but to wants.  Indeed, here is a puzzling irony:  sustainable prairie is destroyed to create non-sustainable prairie-like conditions in urban areas.  Furthermore, in this case reasonable alternatives exist, from using the natural rock that has already been moved to the corners of cultivated fields to fabricated rocks that have the shape and texture of the glacial boulders.  Stewardship conservation of our remaining prairie resource here demands preservation.

Bruce R. Reichenbach

Augsburg. College; Minneapolis, MN  55454

NOTES