Losing Stars and Losing Species

Those who live in cities or large towns in the UK are likely to be accustomed to a night sky of just a few stars as a result of light pollution.  Just as light pollution has removed stars one by one from the night sky we see, extinction removes species from the world, forever, one by one.  Each time I spend a long period of time at home or university I forget what it is like to look up on a clear night and see a light studded sky with clouds of stars.  This feeling of wonderment makes up a part of the intrinsic value of a clear night sky, the value of the enjoyment or fulfilment gained not by using or consuming the sky but simply by enjoying it.  It is this value (applied to nature) which motivates most conservationists, it is also the value hardest to convert to a monetary value.

Luckily the stars are not gone and are waiting to be seen by anyone who is willing to get to a remote enough location.  Many of the species already extinct have left no trace, some have left only skeletons and photos and films remain of the species to be forced to extinction more recently.  Yet, just as someone who lives their whole life in a city, by and large, we do not know what we are missing, what it would have been like to sit and see the world by day, to experience the wild nature, and by night to gaze at the full sky hundreds or thousands of years ago.  This ecological forgetfulness which I have considered in another blog (http://valuingnature.blogspot.pt/2012/07/falling-baselines-and-landscape.html) results in us inheriting a world containing less sources of natural wonderment than the one into which we ourselves were born.  Moreover, we consider the world in which we grow to be ‘normal’, how could we not when we have never known otherwise?

Eventually each human generation leaves behind a world more impoverished than the one it inherited and each successive generation is accustomed to a world of less natural wonderment than the generation before.  Next time you are in the middle of nowhere on a clear night, look up.  Enjoy that wonderment and just consider what the wonderment we have lost from the living natural world just as we have lost stars from the city night sky.  Conservationists try to stem this loss and even to reverse it where possible.  I believe this is a truly important cause.  I believe this due to my intrinsic (non-monetary) valuation of nature.