Preservation Philosophy

To discuss preservation philosophy is to discuss a whole range of attitudes and ideas that touch in some way on the value attached to the aesthetic or public-health benefits of unspoiled landscape. The vastness of North America, which is seen as large enough to contain a fully industrialized economic base and fragile enough to warrant vigilance in regard to the extent and character of industrialization, has been the focus of a variety of American environmental commentary and case law through the whole of the 20th century. One effect has been the emergence of a full-blown philosophy of preservation, with advocates coming at the issue from many sides.

An emotional and psychological attachment to the land has been a feature of the American experience throughout the 20th century. Writing in 1973, Shields develops a philosophical/social frame of reference for environmental issues, citing various concepts of wilderness that have informed U.S. consciousness since 1620, the year of the landing of the Pilgrims. What is significant about Shields's approach is that it describes nuances of definition and basis for discussion that have been with the environm

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at are best left to function without human intervention; (2) that man-made products such as plastic and nuclear waste produce materials that are difficult to dispose of; (3) that human technological intervention or imposition in the natural order of things is most likely to be destructive to natural mechanisms; (4) that human or technical intervention into natural order will have destructive impact on the human experience of the world. Meyers dismisses Commoner's view because it "seems to emphasize the costs and minimize the benefits." All four laws of ecology counsel inaction: do not change nature; avoid technological change; nature's way of doing things is best. Yet, when we ask the ecologist, "why?" we seem to be no farther along than we were before the science of ecology arrived. . . . The ecologist-philosopher's premises, once distilled, rest on ethical and aesthetic beliefs, not scientific facts. In my view, the Four Laws of Ecology are philosophical heirs of the wilderness philosophers. In short, the science of ecology may teach us a great deal about the workings of nature, but the basic philosophy of ecology takes us little farther than Leopold's intuitive Basic Law: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrit
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 10148
Approximate Pages = 41 (250 words per page)

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