Valuing Wildlands
—Environmental Ethics 1985

Valuing Wildlands, Environmental Ethics 7, no. 2 (Spring 1985): 23-48. Online at: http://hdl.handle.net/10217/36768 http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/enviroethics19857111

Valuing wildlands is complex. (1) In a philosophically oriented analysis, I distinguish seven meaning levels of value, individual preference, market price, individual good, social preference, social good, organismic, and ecosystemic, and itemize twelve types of value carried by wildlands, economic, life support, recreational, scientific, genetic diversity, aesthetic, cultural symbolization, historical, character building, therapeutic, religious, and intrinsic. (2) I criticize contingent valuation efforts to price these values. (3) I then propose an axiological model, which interrelates the multiple levels and types of value, and some principles for wildland management policy.

Reprinted in R. Kerry Turner, Kenneth Button, and Peter Nijkamp, eds. Ecosystems and Nature: Economics, Science and Policy (Cheltenham, Gloucester, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing Co., 1999), pages 463-488. Also published in Philosophy Gone Wild.

Also reprinted in J. Baird Callicott and Clare Palmer, eds., Environmental Philosophy: Critical Concepts in the Environment (London: Routledge, 2005), vol. 3, pp. 320-346.