Abstract
It is usually thought that to conserve nature is simply to prevent certain parts of it from being adversely affected in some way – from being hunted to extinction, say, or paved over and turned into parking lots. In the following, however, I argue that nature conservation can also involve efforts to safeguard the various meanings nature has for us. In making my case, I draw on Martin Heidegger’s suggestion that, in the midst of an increasingly technological world, one would do well to cultivate a ‘releasement towards things’. I argue that to ‘release’ oneself towards nature in this way is, amongst other things, to remain open to – or to conserve - the various meanings that it has for us, and to illustrate what this involves, I look to some examples of nature writing, from writers such as Richard Mabey and Mark Cocker. In the final section, I ask whether nature’s meanings ought to be conserved, and I consider some reasons for thinking that they should.
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Notes
- 1.
Explaining what Heidegger means by this would take us too far off track. For present purposes it will suffice to note that by calling technology a way of revealing he does not mean to suggest that technology is merely a way we late moderns are prone to see the world. His main concern is not the anthropological one of describing different worldviews, but the transcendental one of investigating what Iain Thomson calls ‘the conditions of the possibility of intelligibility’ (2005: 54, n.15). See further, Thomson (2005: Chapter 1).
- 2.
Geoffrey Lipman, former President of the World Travel and Tourism Council, quoted in Neale (1998: 34).
- 3.
On these issues, see James (2009: Chapter 4).
- 4.
- 5.
Heidegger himself rejected the practice of what he called ‘values-thinking’, maintaining that ‘through the characterization of something as “a value” what is so valued is robbed of its worth’ and (more hysterically) that ‘thinking in values is the greatest blasphemy imaginable against Being’ (1996: 251). Although there is no good reason to endorse Heidegger’s view that values-thinking is inherently pernicious, there are, I believe, reasons for thinking that many of the ways in which nature matters to us – and, moreover, matters to us morally – are not best conceived in terms of value (see further, James 2009: Chapter 3).
- 6.
I do not have the space here to provide a thorough explanation of Heidegger’s complex account of technology, still less to try to justify it (for an interesting attempt to do both, see Thomson 2005).
- 7.
Think of the anthropomorphic tendency to see animal behaviour in the context of distinctively human norms, for instance, or the tendency to regard natural phenomena as possessing supernatural powers.
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James, S.P. (2012). Conserving Nature’s Meanings. In: Brady, E., Phemister, P. (eds) Human-Environment Relations. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-2825-7_3
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