Intrinsic Value and Landscape Evaluation

Abstract

Assessing the attributes of natural and human-altered landscapes has long been a tradition in geography. The changing process of evaluation over the years demonstrates the importance of continual reinterpretation of conceptions, methodologies, and ethical contexts of landscape use and perception. The concept of intrinsic value has great potential in landscape evaluation because it grounds theoretical discourse and decision-making processes in the essence of the object being evaluated. Intrinsic value refers to the value that a component of nature has in itself. It is distinct from instrumental value, which is related to human use. Intrinsic value is independent of a valuing consciousness. The concept of intrinsic value has roots in Aldo Leopold's ecocentric view of nature and is compatible with the deep-ecology movement. Intrinsic value provides a framework for examining both natural and human-altered features in ways that do not appeal solely to human preference or utility. Consideration of intrinsic values can be used to define the range of appropriate instrumental values that can realized. In this sense, intrinsic value is a supportive rather than a primary justification of an environmental ethic. The concept has already been incorporated into environmental regulations, and it has been applied to nonliving objects. Geographers have introduced the concept into disciplines other than philosophy and ecology as a basis for comprehending landscape, as a starting point for restoring endangered nonliving resources, as a focus of environmental debate, and as a prod to encourage landscape or environmental managers to adopt a creative approach and an openness to alternative views and solutions. The concept of intrinsic value can have a more prominent role in environmental debate and can carry weight in pragmatic decisions in environmental management if it is defined and refined so that it retains its original meaning but is approximated by arguments in human terms. Problems in applying the concept and documenting its value in environmental management have led to separating the concept of intrinsic from that of value. Hence the word intrinsic has been replaced by essential, inherent, noninstrumental, or existent; and the word characteristics has become a substitute for the word value. Three definitions of intrinsic can be used to structure an investigative framework for approximating intrinsic values and can be applied to issues in evaluating landscapes. They are essential or inherent and not merely apparent, referring to substance as distinguished from attributes; originating, or due to causes or factors within a body; and being good in itself or desired for its own sake, without regard to anything else. The definition of intrinsic as essential or inherent and not merely apparent is unambiguous in most living things, but nonliving things can be fabricated using materials similar to those found in the natural object. This difference discriminates between a component of the landscape created by natural processes and one created by human action, even if the artifact has a surface veneer shaped by the processes that would create the feature in nature. A distinction could also be made between a component of a cultural landscape created by human effort in its own time using materials from that period and a component of a landscape created by human action to mimic the earlier landscape. Features that belie their origin or process of creation would not have intrinsic value as the feature they represent, although they would have value as evocative or pedagogic artifacts. The definition of intrinsic as originating or due to causes or factors within a body is problematic when applied to nonliving landscape components because the processes that create them are often extrinsic. A broader definition of the body or system can describe landscape features and include the processes that shape them. The boundary conditions of undeveloped landforms, for example, would be defined by the areal extent of the processes as well as the form. …