Hostname: page-component-84b7d79bbc-x5cpj Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-08-01T14:03:51.493Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Are there any natural resources?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2016

Peter G. Brown
Peter G. Brown*
Affiliation:
School of Environment and the Departments of Geography and Natural Resource Sciences, McGill University 3534 University Street, Montréal, Québec, H3A 2A7, Canada peter.g.brown@mcgill.ca
Get access

Abstract

Local and regional environments have for many centuries been seen as, or as being composed of, “natural resources,” which have generally been considered fully available for human use, irrespective of any use to which other species, purposefully or not, might put them. The global environment has more recently, though less routinely, been seen in this way. I examine full-human-use arguments in three widely credited philosophical traditions: the Judeo-Christian-liberal, the Aristotelian-Cartesian-rationalist, and the utilitarian or neoclassical economic. I find each tradition's full-human-use argument unsatisfactory. I then discuss, and ultimately recommend, an alternative, an all-species-use argument based on Albert Schweitzer's much admired but seldom adopted reverence-for-life ethic. I find revealed by this alternative argument a previously unnamed good, one worthy of honor, protection, and enlargement; I call this good “the commonwealth of life.” In conclusion, I consider important implications of accepting commonwealth-of-life reasoning, including foundational changes in ethics.

Type
Research Article
Information
Politics and the Life Sciences , Volume 23 , Issue 1 , March 2004 , pp. 12 - 21
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Politics and the Life Sciences 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1.Locke, John, Two Treatises of Government, Laslett, Peter, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1960), Second Treatise, ∫ 26.Google Scholar
2.Ibid, First Treatise, ∫ 30.Google Scholar
3.Ibid, First Treatise, ∫ 42.Google Scholar
4.Ibid, Second Treatise, ∫ 33.Google Scholar
5.Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book A (1), Lines 25–7.Google Scholar
6.Descartes, René, Automatism of Brutes in Selections (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1927) p. 360.Google Scholar
7.Mill, John Stuart, “Whewell on Moral Philosophy,” in John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham: Utilitarianism and Other Essays (Middlesex: Penguin, 1987) p. 253.Google Scholar
8.Mill, John Stuart, “Utilitarianism,” in Essential Works of John Stuart Mill (New York: Bantam Matrix, 1965) p. 247.Google Scholar
9.Locke, , First Treatise, ∫39.Google Scholar
10.Griffin, D. R., Animal Minds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).Google Scholar
11.Bentham, Jeremy, “Anarchial Fallacies; Being an Examination of the Declaration of Rights Issued During the French Revolution,” in Works of Jeremy Bentham, Bowring, John, ed., Volume II (New York: Russell & Russell, 1962) Article II, p. 501.Google Scholar
12.Sidgwick, Henry, The Methods of Ethics [1874], 7th ed., reissue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
13.Smart, J. J. C., and Williams, B., Utilitarianism — For and Against (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), pp. 100–107.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
14.Bentham, Jeremy, An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1781), Chapter XVII: Of the Limits of the Penal Branch of Jurisprudence; ∫ 2. Jurisprudence, its branches; XXIX, 2.Google Scholar
15.Costanza, Robert et al., Nature, 387, 15 May 1997, pp. 253–260.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
16.Leopold, Aldo, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 204.Google Scholar
17.Schweitzer, Albert, Out of My Life and Thought (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1933) p. 186.Google Scholar
18.Ibid, p. 185.Google Scholar
19.Schweitzer, Albert, The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle [1931] (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
20.Scott, Colin, “Science for the West, Myth for the Rest? The Case of James Bay Cree Knowledge Construction,” in Naked Science: Anthropological Inquiry into Boundaries, Power, and Knowledge, Nader, Laura, ed. (New York: Routledge, 1996), pp. 69–86.Google Scholar
21.Scully, Matthew, Dominion: The Power of Man, the Suffering of Animals and the Call to Mercy (New York: St. Martin's Press, 2002).Google Scholar
22.Daly, Herman E.Cobb, John B. Jr., For the Common Good (Boston: Beacon Press, 1989), pp. 102–5.Google Scholar
23.Feit, Harvey A., “Waswanipi Cree Management of Land and Wildlife: Cree Ethno-Ecology Revisited,” in Native People, Native Lands: Canadian Indians, Inuit and Metis, Cox, B., ed. (Ottawa: Carlton University Press, 1992), pp. 75–91.Google Scholar
24.Schweitzer, , Out of My Life and Thought, p. 272.Google Scholar
25.Ward, Peter D.Brownlee, Donald, Rare Earth: Why Complex Life is Uncommon in the Universe (New York: Copernicus, 2000).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
26.Vitousek, P. M., et al., “Human Appropriation of the Products of Photosynthesis,” BioScience 36:6, June 1986, pp. 368–373.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
27.Leopold, Aldo, “The Land-health Concept and Conservation” in For the Health of the Land: Previously Unpublished Essays and Other Writings, Callicott, J. Baird and Freyfogle, Eric T., eds. (Washington: Island Press, 1999) p. 219.Google Scholar
28.Carse, James, Finite and Infinite Games (New York: The Free Press, 1986).Google Scholar
29.Brand, Stewart, The Clock of the Long Now (New York: Basic Books, 1999), p. 187.Google Scholar
30.Ibid, p. 161.Google Scholar
31.Ibid, p. 147.Google Scholar