Robert Elliott, "Faking Nature"

• Examples of restoration
• Restoration of wolf to Yellowstone National Park
• No net loss of wetlands policy (developers may fill this wetland here if they create or restored degraded wetlands someplace else
• Restoration thesis:
• Restoration of natural env. after destruction/damage creates something of equal/full value
• Mining dunes example
• Elliott's denial of restoration thesis:
• Restoration can never completely restore value; once natural object has been destroyed, you can never get back its original value no matter how perfectly you restore it
• Elliott's is a philosophical, not practical/technological objection
• Argument purports to show that even if the restoration is molecule for molecule identical, the original value is still not returned
• Practical/technical objection: Restoration is never successful from a technical/practical perspective: You don't get back the same physical system
• E.g., Wetlands restoration is often a miserable failure; restored wetlands usually don't work like the original wetlands
  
• ELLIOTT'S ARGUMENTS
• Analogy with art argument
• Restored nature is like a reproduction of a piece of art
• Both are much less valuable than the original
• E.g., Van Gogh painting destroyed and then recreated with high tech computer
• Restored nature is not natural (=free from significant alteration by humans) and what we valued was a natural environment, not a recreated, human-manipulated nature
• Elliott's assumption about reasons for valuing (his "axiological" claim)
• We value things in part due to their origin, history, and genesis
• Where they came from and the kind of process that created them matter to us
• Examples:
• Beautiful delicate little object we value and admire until find out it was caved from the bone of someone killed to make the object
• Cougar in the woods one that migrated here from Florida or someone's escaped house pet?
• Relational/external properties count, not just internal/intrinsic ones
• Relational properties: Characteristics a thing has only in relation to other things (e.g., being a father)
• Intrinsic/internal properties: Characteristics a thing has apart from its relations (it would still have them if it was the only thing in the world)
• Examples
• London Bridge in Arizona
• Love is historical and relational
• Value individuals because of their history and relationships with us, not solely for their qualities
• We could imagine a person who has all the intrinsic qualities of a person you love but to a much higher degree and you still would not love that person
• An important reason we value the natural world is because of its "naturalness"
• And restored landscapes are lacking in this naturalness value
• Meaning of valuing natural entities for their naturalness
• Causal origin is independent of human intervention
• Sound of water falling over a dam or roar of wild river down rapids?
• Causal contiguity with past
• Unmodified by humans activity to a high degree
• Part of a world unshaped by human hands
• Grizzly bear versus a cow
• Doug fir versus a genetically "improved" version
• Represents a world outside human dominion
• Result of natural process and not human artifice
• Elliott is not assuming natural = good and unnatural = bad
• Relationship between natural and value is much more complicated
• Page 76:
• False that natural is necessarily of value (on balance)
• Cancer cells, and disease/sickness more generally are natural but not good overall
• Natural fires, hurricanes, volcanic eruptions can alter lands for the worse.
• Transforming an utterly barren, ecologically bankrupt landscape into something richer and more subtle may be a good thing
• Humans can improve on nature?
• But this is compatible with the view that replacing a rich natural environment with a rich artificial one is a bad thing
• Naturalness is one factor in determining the value of nature entities
• Does he think naturalness is:
• Always a positive dimension in itself, but no guarantee that something is good overall? (It could be outweighed by negatives)
• Might some artificial things be better than some natural objects with identical properties
• E.g., Sand sculpture (make by son or by wind)
• Pride in something you built
• Question: Can natural value ever come back?