Value of Nature

I was recently in a discussion with a friend, who shall remain nameless, about nature. This particular person was upset about how mankind was destroying the habitats of various animals. After all, he said, we are just as much a part of nature as any other animal, and we have a responsibility to it.

Now, I am a big lover of nature. There's nothing more beautiful than a nice mountain scene or a nice, pristine lake surrounded by greenery and trees. But the question is why do I value it? Well, I value it because I subjectively like those things. Likewise, my friend values those things he views as being destroyed more than what is replacing them.

This goes back to the old debate about intrinsic value. That is, do the things in our natural world inherently posses value in the absence of human beings? Quite simply, they do not. Those things in our natural world only have value in which the human mind attaches to them.

This brings us to the discovery by earlier economists of the Subjective Theory of Value:

Value is not intrinsic, it is not in things. It is within us; it is the way in which man reacts to the conditions of his environment. Neither is value in words and doctrines, it is reflected in human conduct. It is not what a man or groups of men say about value that counts, but how they act. - Ludwig von Mises

The prices that we see every day in the market for goods and services are formed by the aggregate subjective values of the people acting in those markets. In this way, taking relative scarcity into account, higher prices reflect higher values among acting people. If there is a wooded area that gets bulldozed (excluding government coercion and forced sales which are so often present) to put up a housing community, the housing community is more valuable than the wooded area in its natural state. For if the natural wooded area were more valuable, acting people would have prevented its alteration from occurring.

We can ask another question: why are goods and services traded to begin with? Well, the answer is subjective value. Imagine I have a coat and you have book. Now, if the two of us trade these items it is demonstrating our subjective, reverse valuations for those items. That is, I valued the book more than my coat, and you valued my coat more than your book. If this were not so, the exchange would not have taken place.

So, if no coercion by government or people is involved and a natural habitat is torn down for something urban, it is clear that the urban something is more valuable than the thing it replaced. It's exchanging one state of affairs for a better state of affairs by the actors involved.

To the observer, witnessing something you think is beautiful being destroyed is unfortunate for him personally. The problem, like Mises said, is that value is only demonstrated through action. All the silent well-wishers for nature in the world have no impact on the value of things unless they demonstrate it through action.

The well-wisher for nature has only one option open to him: government coercion. Being that people don't value the state of nature as he does, government coercion and force can only be resorted to. What this does is impose the whims of the observer who happens to convince government to intervene for the actual values of acting people in voluntary transactions. It would be no different than the observer desiring government to intervene in the exchange of the coat and the book, for perhaps the observer thinks the "natural," unaltered possession of the coat by me is more valuable than the "unnatural," altered possession of the coat by you.

One last point. Anyone who says that human beings are a virus on the Earth is engaging in a performative contradiction of sorts. The reason is that this person has the ability to reduce this human virus by one. In short, the very existence of the advocate of humans as a virus contracdicts the advocate's own views. For if he truly believed humans were a virus, he wouldn't allow himself to exist and spread such a disease.