Here for Our Children's Children?: Why We Should Care for the Earth

This study reviews the many different bases for wanting to preserve the environment. By seeing how protagonists approach the same situation from different assumptions, some of the origins of environmental conflict may be established, and ways of resolving conflict can be identified.

There are two major issues in environmental ethics: The first asks whether the problems can be solved within current approaches, or require instead lifestyle changes for the whole of western civilisation.

The second issue concerns why the environment should be valued. This review identifies a series in increasingly stronger valuations that can be identified as:

1. Hedonistic we protect the environment because we like it.

2. Utilitarian the environment is valuable to us

3. Consequentialist we want to preserve things for other people now or future.

4. Intrinsic The environment has virtue in its own right

5. Extrinsic we value the environment because it is of consequence to some thing else thei