Jain monks sweep the path ahead of them to avoid treading on any living creature. Cosmic preservationists go one better on the ethical scale: they believe that even rocks have rights and shouldn鈥檛 be abused.
Environmentalism gone mad? Perhaps. Cosmic preservationists are most concerned about extra-terrestrial rocks. For them, space really is the final frontier 鈥� a vast unspoilt wilderness that we should keep our grubby paws off. We can marvel from afar, but we shouldn鈥檛 interfere. Which is why they are most unhappy with Beagle 2, the Mars lander due to be launched on the European Space Agency鈥檚 Mars Express mission in June.
Who are these cosmic preservationists? The leading exponent is Holmes Rolston III, a philosopher at Colorado State University, Fort Collins, who beseeches us to look on planets as 鈥渦nique achievements of nature鈥�. Another is Alan Marshall, a novelist in Sydney, formerly at Wollongong University in New South Wales, who speaks of rocks as existing in 鈥渁 blissful state of satori [enlightenment 鈥� from Zen Buddhism] only afforded to non-living entities鈥�.
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What are they worried about? Space probes apart, aren鈥檛 we centuries away from being able to alter the environment of other planets? True. But the concerns of cosmic preservationists are derived from something much more relevant and closer to home: whether the natural world in general has some intrinsic value that we should respect, beyond those values that we humans simply find useful.
This idea of 鈥渆nvironmental ethics鈥� entered the mainstream with the publication in 1975 of an essay by none other than Holmes Rolston III. He believes that nature possesses value independently of people, and that we therefore have a duty to respect it and protect it for its own sake. He wants us to get away from the anthropocentric view of the environment held by most people in the West, a view he sums up thus: 鈥淔or them, humans can have no duties to rocks, rivers or ecosystems, and almost none to birds or bears; humans have serious duties only to each other, with nature often instrumental in such duties.鈥�
Have his ideas caught on? Yes 鈥� they have spawned entire movements, such as Earth First!, a radical green activist group, and the Deep Ecology Movement, whose members seek a relationship with the natural world as 鈥渄eep鈥� as the relationship they have with people. Deep ecologists believe in a sacred relationship between humans and nature. As Arne Naess, the Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer who founded the movement, puts it: 鈥淲e need to get rid of subject, object and something in between, the 鈥榤e-it鈥� relationship. All is one. This is about feeling rather than thinking.鈥�
Cosmic preservationism takes this one step further. Welcome to the new front line in the eco-wars.