Peter Godfrey-Smith

It's quite possible to think that these things should be protected and treated in quite special ways, not because they're alive, but because they have special kinds of value that are properly seen as quite separate from any commodity type role they have.

The quote from Le Guin really said it like that.

This is one way of departing from the commercial exploitative mindset, not necessarily the only way.

That's a big thing for me.

All through here, the idea that there are other options beside the two that people like McFarlane and also his interlocutors and the people he works with, there are other options beside the two that are forever being contrasted here, you know, commodity versus living system in its own right.

There are less theoretically problematic ways of recognizing the value in natural systems and their entitlement, or at least the goodness of protecting them.

There are ways of doing that without going down this animist road.

Good for the earth, good for the whole system, which includes us, includes them.

I mean, that's a very good question.

And for someone like me, it's a big thing and I don't want to sound glib about it.

And once you say that the river is an organism in its own right, it solves the problem of where the alternative locus of value might be.

It's then straightforward to say, we humans are not the only value bearers in this situation.

The river is an organism too, and it should get a say.

It should have its rights respected.

If you do go down what we might think of as this kind of animist road,

It does solve that problem.

And the sort of third and fourth on the different sorts of options that I'm trying to sort of just keep on the table, pushing back against the dichotomous treatment here, they have hard philosophical problems tangled up in them.

But I do think that the alternative paths I'm trying to keep on the table here are paths in which the Yosemite Valley or these rivers, the cloud forest, the systems that are paradigm cases of things worthy of protection here are not worthy of protection just because it's good for us.