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Biodiversity and Agricultural Landscapes: Can the Wicked PolicyProblems Be Solved?
ANDREW BRENNAN
12
 
This is the pre-publication draft of a paper that appears inPacific Conservation Biology 10, 2 (2004): 124 - 143© Andrew Brennan 2003 
1
Philosophy Discipline, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley, Western Australia 6009, Australia.Email: abrennan@cyllene.uwa.edu.au.
2
Philosophy Program, La Trobe University, Victoria 3086, Australia.
 
 
Conservation issues for agricultural landscapes are typical examples of 'wicked' public policy problems:that is, ones in which questions are not clearly defined, and there is apparent conflict between differentsets of values, all of which are legitimate. The paper argues that how to protect intrinsic value in nature isitself a wicked policy problem, complicated by the fact that at least three different senses of "intrinsic value"are easily confused. The challenge for policy in Australian agriculture is how to protect remaining naturalvalues by processes that are fair to stakeholders, governed by scientific credibility and sensitive to theplurality of values held by groups within the community. The paper argues that scientists themselves canplay an important role not just in problem definition, but also in helping set the agenda for action that willbe effective in preserving natural diversity.Keywords: Biodiversity, scientific credibility, public policy, intrinsic value, salinity policy 
INTRODUCTION
This paper attempts to map a conceptual framework within which to think about the conservation of  biodiversity and the management of natural resources.The focus is on those Australian landscapes andenvironments where agriculture, or agribusiness, iscarried on. As will be shown, many of the issues facingagricultural policy are not purely technical; thescientists, economists and other specialists who work inthis field have been called on to provide more thanoptimal solutions to well-defined technical problems.Ecologists and zoologists who have been active in bringing Australia’s environmental problems to publicattention are already aware that they fulfil more than a purely scientific role in the broader community. Indeed,the very notions in which public discourse is phrased – terms like “harm”, “disease”, “biodiversity”, “natural”,“pollution”, “scarcity” – have no agreed scientificdefinition.Urgency is given to the present investigation in thelight of the fact that a plethora of policies, strategies andlegislative instruments over the last twenty years – aimed at conserving biodiversity – have apparently beenhighly ineffective. It is therefore an open questionwhether Australia will be able to protect its remainingendemic fauna and flora from the kind of damage whichhas typified the two centuries of European occupation of the land. Linked to this question is a profound puzzle.Why, in the light of so many initiatives to counter species loss, land degradation and the threats toterrestrial ecosystems, has the Australian environmentcontinued to show signs of marked decline in keyfeatures? Although the present paper has no definitiveanswer to the puzzle, the framework developed herediagnoses some of the factors that may have contributedto the problematic situation and provides a basis for  practical steps to reverse the decline in the quality of Australia’s natural environment.
POLICIES, ETHICS AND WICKED PROBLEMS
Communities of human beings can be thought of asnested structures containing further sub-communities.While some common patterns of behaviour, sharedvalues and dispositions will be widespread over somelarge populations – for instance, those who are allcitizens of a single nation-state – even countries that arenot very populous show clear subdivisions into sub-communities marked by political, religious, ethical andother differences. Such differences show up in manyways, for example by adoption of different rituals,different styles of dress, divergent forms of language,distinct notions of identity, different understandings – and networks – of obligation and so on. When a largecommunity has to make major policy decisions, the process leading to these will typically reveal theexistence of divergent concerns and values among itssubgroups. A major problem in such cases is findingagreement in language so that dialogue andcommunication move forward despite the presence of a plurality of perspectives, ambitions, anxieties andvalues.Many environmental problems are “wicked” (Ritteland Webber 1973); that is they involve competitionamong many different kinds of goods and a multitude of  perfectly legitimate interests. Rittel and Webber arguedthat to take wicked problems as having true or false,optimal or sub-optimal answers is to invite confusion,namely the confusion between problems that can beclearly defined and readily solved, and problems thatrequire compromise, balance and trading acrosslegitimate values. Since wicked problems cannot beclearly defined, it is hard – if not impossible – to tellwhen they have been resolved. Since wicked problemsinvolve the competition between multiple goods anddifferent – but perfectly legitimate – values, it is nothelpful to regard them as having right or wronganswers. The emergence during the twentieth centuryof new forms of environmental ethics has helped givesubstance to the idea that there are values in natureworth preserving for their own sake, not just for their usefulness to humans. However, the moral crusade to protect centres of intrinsic value in nature – whether individuals, species, landscapes or systems – has runinto direct conflict with the commodification of natureassociated with economic rationalism and theanthropocentric basis of many existing legal and political instruments and institutions. In the resultingdebates, opponents may find themselves locked intomutual denunciation and misunderstanding – featurestypical of wicked problem situations. Agriculturalscientists, ecologists and zoologists are in difficultterritory here. While they would like to draw on the
 
BRENNAN: BIODIVERSITY AND AGRICULTURAL LANDSCAPES
50enthusiasm of conservation organizations, theconceptual resources of philosophy and the modellingskills of economists, they can instead find themselvesunder friendly fire from all directions. Finding alanguage acceptable to many or all interests is not itself a trivial matter. To begin with, it may be useful toclarify some notions about value itself.
Values in nature – instrumental and non-instrumental
It is common to regard many debates and argumentsabout value in terms of clashes of rights. For example,farmers may claim a right to clear their land, whilesome of their neighbours demand a right to enjoy ahealthy and biotically diverse landscape. Conservationgroups and radical environmentalists are sometimesaccused of talking as if nature has rights – though in factthere have been few systematic attempts to make senseof the idea of rights for natural things apart from certainanimals (for a systematic attempt to establish thatanimals have rights, see Regan 1983, and for a reviewof the main positions in environmental ethics seeBrennan and Lo 2002). Rights talk, however, isambiguous and not the most basic level of ethicaldiscourse. Many moral systems can make no sense of the notion of rights at all, which is why JeremyBentham famously dismissed all talk about rights as“nonsense on stilts” (Bentham 1789). A utilitariantheory – which counts action as right when it has a goodoutcome – will generally be sceptical of the idea of rights, preferring instead to think about actions in termsof whether they promote welfare, pleasure or thesatisfaction of preferences. Non-utilitarian theorists whoare willing to ascribe rights to humans are also generallyunwilling to ascribe rights to nature or its parts (for more details see Taylor (1986)). Either kind of theory,however, can still make sense of values being of different kinds and being attached to more than justhuman beings. For example, in the utilitarianism of Peter Singer, the outcomes of our actions need to bemorally valued in terms of preferences, pleasures, painsand suffering for any sentient being, not just those of humans (Singer 1975; 1993). When Singer uses the phrase “animal rights” this is, for him – though not for Regan – merely a
 façon de parler 
.One way of putting Singer’s moral position is to saythat, for him, the experiences of some non-human beings have value or disvalue. The pain of a rat issomething about which we should be morallyconcerned, he argues. By arguing in this way, heextends the kind of view which was held by G. E.Moore that the only intrinsically valuable things in theworld were human experiences (Moore 1903).Certainly, there seem to be some experiences whichhumans value for their own sake – the experience of  being with family and friends, the challenge of asporting competition, the attempt to learn a piece of music, the taste of a fresh strawberry, and so on. To callsuch experiences
intrinsically
valuable is just to claimthat they are valuable in themselves, withoutconsidering any further end they serve. While Moore’sconception of value was targeted exclusively on humanexperience, Singer (1993) extends the notion to animalexperience especially the experience of pain andsuffering.
“If a being suffers”
, he writes,
“there can beno moral justification for refusing to take that suffering into consideration”
(p.50). For him, then, pain is bad initself whether suffered by a human or an animal.What about things and people, rather thanexperiences? Valuable things may include human beings, higher animals, and abstract phenomena likeeducation, justice, honour, truth and love. For suchthings, we can ask to what extent these have value as ameans to some further end – instrumental value – and towhat extent they are of non-instrumental value. Toavoid confusion, it is important to separate out differentmeanings and get clear on notions like
intrinsic
,
extrinsic
,
objective
and
 subjective
. These distinctionsare not often made clearly in the literature of either environmental philosophy or environmental economics.Here are some definitions:(i)
 
 x
has
non-instrumental value
:
 x
has valueindependent of its usefulness, that is regardless of whether 
 x
is a means to some other end. Human beings are the prime example of things of non-instrumental value (e.g., Kant 1785).(ii)
 
 x
has
non-subjective value
(i.e.,
objective value)
:
 x
 has value independent of subjects’ attitudes. Somewriters argue that natural objects and processeshave just such value: for example, a world with adiversity of plant species, but without any valuingsubjects in it, would be objectively valuable in thissense (e.g., Routley 1973; Rolston 1975).(iii)
 
 x
has
non-relational value ( 
sometimes called
non-extrinsic value)
:
 x
has value independent of anyrelation
 x
may or may not have to anything else(Moore 1904). Some writers argue that everyanimal has equal value, whether the species towhich it belongs is endangered or not, whether endemic or not. This would be because eachanimal is a centre of life and experience – a property that depends on no relations to other things (Regan 1983).Some writers use the term “intrinsic value” as simplyequivalent to “non-instrumental value”. Using it thisway does not exclude its opposite: trees can be valuedfor their own sake even though trees provide timber for many uses. However, it is easy to slide from sense (i) toa stronger sense such as (ii) or (iii). Many writers haveargued both for the intrinsic (non-instrumental) value of nature and for the objectivity of value in nature(Callicott 1989; Rolston 1989).Generally, writers who claim that nature, or naturalthings, have intrinsic value all agree that “intrinsic”means at least what is captured in definition (i). Noticethat things which have value in virtue of being rare or endemic to an area will not have that value in the third,non-relational sense (even though they may additionallyhave intrinsic value in sense (i)). In the context of conservation, rarity itself is a disvalue. A butterflycollector may treasure a specimen because of its rarity, but conservation efforts targeted on the last individuals
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