Values gone wild

Abstract

Wilderness valued as mere resource for human-interest satisfaction is challenged in favor of wilderness as a productive source, in which humans have roots, but which also yields wild neighbors and aliens with intrinsic value. Wild value is storied achievement in an evolutionary ecosystem, with instrumental and intrinsic, organismic and systemic values intermeshed. Survival value is reconsidered in this light. Changing cultural appreciations of values in wilderness can transform and relativize our judgments about appropriate conduct there. A final valued element in wildness is its idiographic historical particularity, and most surprising is the emergence of a novel morality when humans learn to let values go wild.