Rolston's Essay The Little Things That Run The World

NATURAL LAW AND THE EFFECTS OF CHOICE

Everything in this world has an order in which it should be. Everything also has significance in one way or another. These values, if you will, are in which our decisions come from. If it has a high value then it is worth taking notice of and worth doing something about. For so many years we (us humans) have placed a higher value on our selves than the value that comes from nature (wilderness) and we underestimate its worth. “Nature is a value producer,” Holmes Rolston III states in his essay “Environmental Ethics: Values in and duties to the Natural World” and he places “systemic value” on it (p.84). Meaning that there is no value within itself, yet, it still produces value. The “laws of nature”
Wilson asserts that “the world would do just finely if all were to disappear.” (c.f., p.46) This is amazingly true because all we do is try to change things and make things our way no matter how destructive it is. “Invertebrates” out number us, this is a fact, and they have been here way longer then we have. The key reason I bring this point up is because all “invertebrates” do is explore the world in which they live in and make do the best they can. They maintain a social structure (i.e., an ant hill) and they do it by not uprooting the environment. “The truth is we need invertebrates but they don’t need us” this point exactly should put something in our minds that the way we’ve been thinking is wrong (Wilson, p.47). We forget about little things like “invertebrates” that are responsible for our very existence. We couldn’t be here without them; we couldn’t do the work that they do. Wilson stresses this point all through out his essay and he sums it up by saying as a key point, “it needs to be repeatedly stressed that invertebrates as a whole are even more important in the maintenance of ecosystems than are vertebrates” (c.f., p.48). Meaning if we don’t take care of them and make sure that all “invertebrate” specie flourish we will have even more of a problem on our hands. Problems often arise from the uncertainty of most sciences also. For instance, Fjelland asserts that “laboratory experiments” often fool us because we try to maintain total control over a system that isn’t controllable and we try to factor in the other conditions. But what we don’t seem to notice is that the result ends up skewed because in a “natural system” there are several uncontrollable factors leading to the point of “risk assessment.” “When we have uncertainty, it means that we know what can go