Wilderness: the Political Philosophy of Habitat Conservation.

we grow up surrounded
by tangible cultural artifacts and intangible cultural values and we're trained to believe from our earliest childhood forward that these artifacts that these values are intrinsic unquestionable transcendental necessary to our lives as human beings or necessary to the future of our culture our nationality our creed grew up walking around downtown toronto the opera really the ballet we have a ballet company in downtown who who goes to the ballet here here in victoria canada that's the same thing the government pays millions of dollars to keep this opera company going to keep this ballet theater going really really oh no no no you can't question it these cultural institutions these cultural artifacts no matter how many millions of dollars people pour into them no matter how no matter how many of millions of your dollars of taxpayers dollars you can't question this is inviolable unquestionable sacrosanct he says some kind of innate value even if nobody goes to see it so what none of your friends have ever been to the ballet you've never heard of anyone no one's ever told it was a good ballet or a good up that's not the point it's unquestionable you can't question it to a very significant extent the discourse surrounding habitat conservation you may say the most practical aspect of the philosophy of nature it's put in this same hallowed unquestionable sacrosanct category and now for more than 20 years i've been trying to drag it out of that unquestioned unthinkable category and get people to really think about it so about four years ago i was talking about this a lot within veganism as a movement i got a question from a long time viewer today and he says he's been watching every single video i uploaded for for years but i'm guessing it's two years or three years because he hasn't seen the last videos i made on this topic the video i'm making today is in response to questions that came in from that viewer but as you'll get the impression right his questions were of a somewhat different nature and my answer is going to be significantly different from anything i've i've said about this before um it's not an easy question it's not a simple question it's just a question that i already thought about a great deal and struggled with a great deal more than 20 years ago so it seems simple to me it seems simple to me because this is an area of philosophy i was interested in for such a long time such a long starting such a long time ago and that i have dealt with again and again face to face with people now look it's really important in dealing with these sacrosanct unquestionable cultural values in our societies it's really important to point out no the value of these things is just decided politically it's just determined by 12 people wearing suits and ties in a parliament building or if you live in a dictatorship it might be 12 people wearing suits and ties in some military bureau or some kind of people there's no problem with no elections but ultimately human beings sit down at a desk it's not that many human beings and there's not that much democratic participation there's not that much transparency there's nothing but some human beings sit down at a desk and decide how much is this opera really worth how how much are we putting into the ballet this year and it can be any number it can be zero and it can be 10 million it could be 30 million it could be billion this is just a political decision and you can regard this as having cultural value and you can train yourself to perceive that value as innate in these things but how much should a school teacher's salary be in canada i confronted a professor about this let me tell you something i won i won this debate there were not two sides to this argument um the this professor kept referring to school teachers in canada as being underpaid that they were paid less than what they would be paid naturally meaning the free market mean what what does nature mean in this context and i this was kind of sort of socratic method i confronted her on this and ultimately the only conclusion because i pointed out to her i said there is no natural salary there is no natural price for what school teachers get paid this is something entirely created by a political process preferably a democratic political process but quite likely an arbitrary political process where for example the teachers have some politicians on their side they have some lawyers hired by their union and they demand a certain amount of money and then there are 12 or 15 politicians who sit down in a room and they decide how much money they're going for it is 100 a political decision there is no role for nature in this equation we're dealing entirely with the theater of human created values values that human beings impose on the natural world and if you keep doing it from your earliest childhood till the day you go to your grave you start to see these things as having intrinsic value but your your you really just demonstrating the extent to which your brain washed um this is not to say that i'm claiming teachers are paid too much or too little in canada my point is if you're going to make that argument you can't appeal to a natural price to compare to what those teachers are currently being paid you can't just appeal to what they're really worth as something known or knowable now you tell me what are elephants worth if you live in a poverty-stricken country like laos tiny poverty-stricken country just north of cambodia could use cambodia as an example we could use sri lanka as an example we could use myanmar what what are what are the elephants worth what are the monkeys worth the last tigers they got some exotic jungle goats you ain't even heard of like the spindle horn endangered species they got uh they got lorases very charming creatures vaguely resemble a monkey but in terms of evolution what's what's it worth what's it worth and you're sitting there with a finite budget as the government you got to worry about the military health care you're in a country when i live there medical doctors are being paid 15 us dollars a month right so they're all corrupt all every doctor has to take bribes because the salary the kept in the government is embarrassingly low the whole society is corrupt due to this kind of systemic underpayment of government employees how how much how much your elephant's worth and that's just if i'm asking the question in terms of the government paying for the opera paying for the ballet paying for these other things we we value assuming i'm not even factoring in the opportunity cost that's a technical term in economics the opportunity cost is if you value these elephants if you value these monkeys if you value these trees if you value this habitat that they they rely on that's going to cost you way more money because it means you have to sit there and say no this japanese charcoal corporation wants to cut down the forest get a lot of money from the wood and then plant this particular type of mass mono crop that gets grown very quickly and turned into charcoal briquettes to export to japan so they can grill fish on huge huge business oh there's this other company that wants to mine gold whatever the example may be uh there was a little bit of gold mining in laos when i was there and they would come up with all these excuses as to why the gold mine justified cutting down jungle remarkably far away from the globe i remember i remember a forest being cut down um to build a golf course and i was very upset about it i talked to some government officials and i remember this is not the only case instead they said look man if you've been out there i said trust me that forest has already been cut down they said trust me this it may be forced on the map if you go don't worry they're building that golf course over a parking lot there's nothing there in any case um what are these things worth many of us are trained from birth to regard the forest as a kind of temple to regard nature as a kind of cultural product paradoxically to regard elephants as if they are statues and in the same way that we justify the government having a budget for museums what do museums exist for to preserve and present something beautiful for human consumption for human delectation for human enjoyment right you don't want to know you don't want to know how many millions of dollars your government is wasting on museums um my point is not to say that elephants are worthless that's not my perspective my point is to say we're just we're just dealing with my perspective and your perspective and human perspectives the terrifying reality is that there are 12 or 15 people in expensive suits who are going to make this decision and who already have made this decision in the country you're living in right now right which species can be hunted and which are protected they sit there and look at a map and they take a pencil and they outline the area where it's illegal to cut down trees and they outline the area where all the trees are going to be cut down and harvested for lumber right so this is with almost no exceptions what i've just described is is a global phenomenon this is the reality of government and it's the it reflects the profoundly political nature of nature itself in the 23rd century that the value of nature is going to be arrived at by small numbers of people in positions of political power preferably democratically preferably with with some transparency right now from my perspective the budget for the ballet is very difficult to justify the budget for the opera is very different difficult to justify and i got to say something if i live in toronto canada i'm looking at the ballet and i'm looking at the opera and i'm saying if you shut this down it will leave the world no poorer nothing will be lost there there is nothing of value that will be irretrievably lost it is not that we will be snuffing out the great canadian tradition of third-rate imitations of italian culture nothing is going to be lost here right now by contrast i have a totally separate genre of videos where i'm talking about the importance of trying to motivate the canadian government to have education for indigenous languages to languages like the inuit language cree ojibwe mohawk in the united states navajo first nations languages india if you allow those languages to go extinct they're good gone forever and something really is lost right there is actually a very different difficult interesting question to be asked what if we allow our indigenous culture to go extinct because that doesn't exist in italy and doesn't exist in germany and then i think people have to sit in a room make a very different set of decisions about government government funding for the arts which 98 of government funding for the arts in canada is a scam that should be abolished that's horrifying what's done with taxpayers money in the name of the arts but of course already there we have a significant shift in terms of the underlying values and the palpable real world objectives and the consequences of the decisions we make if we don't pay to preserve this right the most fundamental criterion that differentiates the elephants from the ballet dancers that differentiates all these questions of habitat conservation conservation of wild species from the questions of merely human cultural preservation is that nature by definition is self-instantiating and self-sustaining all right the point is the forest left to its own devices will regenerate and even expand the forest we don't have to do that for it okay you would not believe how much money it takes just to keep a painting on the wall from rotting you would not believe how much money your government is spending right now to maintain churches and cathedrals and synagogues you have no idea if you walk through you just think oh it's a stained glass window you know what it takes to preserve a window that's more than 500 years old you know what it takes to sustain mosaics and paintings that are on you know paintings normally they're made of egg white and egg yolk by the way you know the actual materials the painting are made of they don't last for a thousand years you know it's not made it's not made out of steel and guess what steel doesn't last for a thousand years all of these you know things you can take for granted as inert that's sitting around you even you know ancient cultural artifacts that are made of solid stone like stonehenge in england you want to look up how much money it takes to create the illusion of stasis just to make those things sustainable for human beings to still be able to see and touch that cultural heritage or that history all right left to its own devices nature will reproduce itself restore itself expand itself right and the works of man will degenerate into dust if you've seen other videos on my channel you know when it comes to the catholic church the whole legacy of the dark ages i think there are a lot of institutions we really have to have the self-discipline now to stop paying money to sustain stop paying money to restore and rebuild we have to have the maturity to let them finally degenerate into dust all right and then there are other decisions we're going to make where we decide hey the plays of william shakespeare still have some meaning and some well if it's the modern world we're not ready to let go of that um there's a species of monkey in yunnan that eats almost nothing but moss and lichen they're like called like leica novores okay it's very beautiful and haunting sort of monkey cute cute too the indigenous people of that part of yunnan regarded them as quite literally the ghosts of the dead now the behaviors of these monkeys along with their somewhat ghastly appearance uh all contributed to this cultural tradition they have no nose they're noseless monkeys so they have slits just like looking at a human skull i'm sure this is part of what inspired the indigenous people so you seem to be looking at a living human skull and most of their bodies as adults uh the fur is black but the face and sort of like a wreath around their wisps of white and when humans go past um just behaviorally they'll come down from the trees and just stick their face through the trees to look at you out of curiosity because they can recognize that you as a human are something not so different from so you get these ghastly white faces coming out of the forest to look at you with curiosity and they have no noses they have these just nose slits on this pale white face looking at you so the indigenous people there thought of these as the spirits of their own dead ancestors spirits of you know human beings reincarnated or just not even reincarnated they just regarded these as ghosts walking the earth now obviously i do not accept the cultural value that that culture in the past imposed on that animal as the last time i read about it in their natural habitat those monkeys were down to their last tree there was really one last tree and one last tiny piece of habitat and the problem is what their evolved for what they're used to is collecting this stuff like moss and lichen over a huge area you can imagine they've got to be able to go over that huge area without being attacked by dogs dogs can run them down and tear them to shreds especially if they can't run up a tree to escape they're all these terrifying problems and it's just teetering on the brink of extinction and um we can keep them alive in zoos that's no problem i've seen them in zeus you know can you sustain the habit can you draw a line on the map and say no this far no further for human civilization you can use the trees up to a certain point and then it's got to stop all right now if you can do that it's it's so little to ask we get to live in a world with these monkeys and in sri lanka i mean i can remember getting out of a car at the side of the road and the elephant was right there where human beings were really living among wild elephants not tame dolphins they also live among tamed elephants another story but you know having wild elephants and monkeys and to have this you know surrounding you all right when we're not even really questioning what is it worth what do we have to justify in terms of government policy in the same ways with the opera and the ballet we're just asking is this meaningful enough is this valuable enough to justify the government drawing that line on the map and saying no more this is the end of human civilization human civilization has some value and it's finite and it's ultimately the job of a small number of people in a room in positions of political authority to define exactly where it starts and stops exactly where it ends and to say these things in nature whether it's a monkey or a mouse you know it doesn't have to be something so photogenic as a as an elephant it may be you know these things don't exist for our entertainment for our edification like pictures in a museum right nature exists for itself all right and we we also we as humans can recognize we exist for ourself we don't need some further justification or purpose for our existence but that existence is finite it's not that we can't use a hundred percent of the land mass of china or 100 the land mass of sri lanka laos cambodia or even can it's not that we can't it's that we shouldn't it's that ultimately there is an infinite infinite difference between managing to sustain those few trees in that one park so that that population of monkeys can regenerate if you're talking about elephants you know to say oh no okay this last forest god knows that's the situation in cambodia laos northeastern thailand you know very often you're down to your last little patch oh no no no it's not that it's only a one percent difference to go from 99 extinct to 100 extinct something is lost there that human beings can never make again all right we can close down the opera we can close down the ballet and you know what maybe in the next 20 years fashions change and people in canada are once again fascinated with italian opera the way they were in the 1920s and you know what people go out and rent a venue and start performing opera again there's a new hit movie the new hit youtube videos with opera and ballet fine you know you can people can go into the library and blow the dust off the manuscripts and start performing opera again right you can bring that back 20 years from now or 200 years from now it almost seems inevitable that it'll happen at some point um right once a language goes extinct it's gone forever you can never bring it back right the there's something that happens with a mother transmitting a language to a child that can never be reproduced with a chalkboard in a textbook right there's there's something about a language that's lost forever when it's driven to extinction there's something about elephants there's something about walruses there's something about mice whatever the species may be right when you take that step to drive it to extinction right it can never be brought back and of course that's not just because of the genetics involved it's not just because of the continuous succession of animals living in the wild and transmitting their instincts and experiencing it's because of the habitat all right you can burn down the church and you can build another church that's what they're doing right now in paris france with rebuilding the notre dame cathedral um you can never rebuild the wilderness you can never replace the wild once it's gone