Brendon Chen
Professor Johnston
Philosophy 003
Nov 29, 2013

The Balance Point of Being and Nature
Economic development has taken a heavy toll on our ecosystem. The "Millennium Ecosystem Assessment" report looks at a broad range of "ecosystem services" that people derive from nature, and finds that the future availability of those services is far from certain. A few of the many advantages from the nature offers us clean air to breathe, fish for eating, and wood for building. Thus, how to protect these sources of our earth and keep our ecosystem healthy that has become an important topic. Our human beings need to find a new equilibrium point between economic development and the healthy ecosystem.
Does nature have intrinsic value in itself? A standard answer is that nature itself has no intrinsic value. Nature has no value if we do not use it. Nature has only instrumental value such as it can produce creature satisfaction. Try to think about a planet overflowing with plant life but with no any living creatures.
Does this planet have any value? We may say it does not; however, Leopold’s land ethic seem holding that such a planet has intrinsic or inherent value. The problem is to explain how something could have value, which is without an evaluator value. We should agree the nature has an intrinsic value, but it is equal to the value of social economic value. Many animals or plants exit, and they are not for us to make the value functions of our society because they are belong to the nature and the Earth. “One basic weakness in a conservation system based wholly on economic motives is that most members of the land community have no economic value. Wildflowers and songbirds are examples. Of the 22,000 higher plants and animals native to Wisconsin, it is doubtful whether more than 5 percent can be sold, fed, eaten, or otherwise put to economic use. Yet these creatures are members of the biotic community, and if (as I believe) its stability depends on its integrity, they are entitled to continuance”(The Land Ethic). These flowers and animals cannot be economic used, but they exist to keep our ecosystem healthy since we might not know these creatures how to effect in the nature. If they were disappeared by human, then they would return a bad result to us. We have known breaking out this universal balance point is a bad idea for our future.
Another hand, we have figured out the bad results had come already. Today, we are having two major unsolved problems, which are lacking grassland and globalized warming. One report we must mention that. “The alterations to ecosystems made by humans in the last 50 years, the assessment said, have far exceeded the changes made in previous periods. Increasing demands for food, fresh water, fuel and other natural goods have fueled this accelerating pace of change. The amount of land converted to agriculture since 1945 exceeds that put to agricultural use in the 18th and 19th centuries combined. Synthetic nitrogen fertilizers were first made in 1913, but more than half of the total ever used has been used since 1985. Converting land to agriculture has produced benefits in the form of increased crop and livestock production, but has also caused a loss of habitat for many species. The experts who put together the Millennium Assessment concluded that the diversity of life on Earth has suffered a substantial and irreversible decline; currently, they say, some 10% to 30% of mammal, bird and amphibian species are in danger of extinction”(Larson). Clearly, a new faith we need, and the faith in the most important reality: planet Earth, Home-globe, Ecosphere. We are continuous to use land for producing food, but we lose the grassland then lead us to get a global warming. We can see the below source, which is about land to agriculture.

Millennium Ecosystem Assessment
In the past 60 years, more land has been put to agricultural use than in the 18th and 19th centuries combined. In 2000, cultivated