The Great American Desert

At first glance, this doesn’t look like an ethics article,  And no matter how many times you glance, or even look carefully, you won’t make a traditional ethical analysis out of Edward Abbey’s love letter to the desert.  However, there’s a reason that Weston included this excerpt here – it makes us think about some of the different ways that values are developed, justified, felt, and expressed, as well as about the different objects or subjects that have value.  Is the desert an object or a subject here?  That is an interesting question – but here I will focus on the questions that Weston poses.

What values does Abbey describe here?  Abbey describes both his own values and the values he thinks that the desert possesses.  Both of these help explain why he loves and appreciates the desert and why he wants to protect it.  At first he describes what is least lovable about the desert – the dangers and inconveniences, discomfort and emptiness.  It turns out that this is also what he finds most lovable about the desert: its radical difference from most of what we value.  It is unfamiliar, strange, not oriented or arranged for human comfort or even human survival.  It is independent and above all wild.

Are these moral values? We could also ask if these are social ethics values – in other words, are they related to human society and collective life?  Is ther emoral value in independent wild nature, including the parts of nature that do not really support human habitation?  Abbey would say yes, I think.  There is something profoundly moral – and not just emotional or aesthetic – in his love for the desert.  By “moral” here I mean values that take us out of ourselves, that can guide us in a way that is not self-interested but rather oriented toward a more general interest.

Can love for nonhuman nature be moral?  Why or why not?  This is the question of whether nature can be a general value – and Abbey certainly thinks it can.  For him, in fact, love of nature might be the most general value of all.  The “silent world” of the desert, with its noxious bugs and extreme temperatures and toxic plants, shows us a world that does not exist for us and that takes us outside our personal and even human self-interest.  As Abbey would say, “That’s why.”