Here is a fabulous article! I WISH this guy's book had been translated into English!!!
Anyway, this is what I was thinking about as I visited these trees.
Everything has intrinsic value. Dandelion; oak; hare; orca; ant; zooplankton; inkcap mushroom. And I'm inclined to add, river, glade, forest, sea, moorland. These individuals or collectives are also part of an entangled web which grants each one instrumental value. The oak tree has instrumental value to the squirrel. And vice versa. But the oak tree also values the pine marten who ensures that all his acorns are not eaten by a vast and sedentary population of squirrels (that would have an instrumental disvalue to the oak). The oak tree has value to many, but a land of only oak trees would not be great because many more require trees other than oaks. Or have value in deserts or rivers where oaks are not.
You might mistakenly think that this implies that one could come up with a hierarchy and an ideal state of how many of this and how many of that. but no. Firstly because intrinsic value is not comparable. It just IS. Secondly because everything is not static: it is becoming and so there is a mutability that is not predictable. Thirdly because different becomings arise from different relationships, and different becomings are available to have different relationships in different places and times, which means that the number of potentials may be limitless.
It is all a wilful experiment in living with no clockmaker.
After thinking of this, I came to some passages in Stacy Alaimo's Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self that seemed to express what I experience when I attend to the natural world. She is referring to the work of Australian philosopher Elizabeth Grosz.
Grosz’s compelling philosophical reconsideration of Darwinian theory stresses its open dynamism: Darwin develops an ontology, an account of a real, that is profoundly different from that of his predecessors and contemporaries, in which life is now construed as an open and generative force of self-organization and growing material complexity, where life grows according to a materiality, a reality, that is itself dynamic, that has features of its own which, rather than exhibiting ongoing stability or given static qualities, rather than being seen as responsive or reactive, are as readily understood in terms of the active forces of interaction that generate and sustain change.
A little later in this section she considers Karen Barad, an American feminist theorist and physicist. She starts with a quotation from Barad’s book Meeting the Universe Halfway.
“We are of the universe—there is no inside, no outside. There is only intra-acting from within and as part of the world in its becoming”. An “ethics of mattering,” she argues, “is not about right response to a radically exterior/ized other, but about responsibility and accountability for the lively relationalities of becoming of which we are a part”. In other words, “ethics is about accounting for our part of the tangled webs we weave”. Dwelling on the recognition that “‘environments’ and ‘bodies’ are intra-actively co-constituted” can provoke a potent trans-corporeal ethics that attends to the material interrelations of bodies and places. Recognizing how the bodies of all living creatures intra-act with place—with the perpetual flows of water, nutrients, toxicants, and other substances—makes it imperative that we be accountable for our practices. Acknowledging the agency of all that is not human affirms the need for places in which creatures, ecological systems, and other nondiscrete life forms can flourish. Barad concludes Meeting the Universe Halfway with an enmeshed, intra-active, posthuman ethics: “Intra-acting responsibly as part of the world means taking account of the entangled phenomena that are intrinsic to the world’s vitality and being responsive to the possibilities that might help us and it flourish”. This profound sense of entanglement, intra-activity, and perpetual emergence fosters an ethical stance that insists that the activities and knowledge practices of the human are always part of, and accountable to, the wider world.
It is this sense of responsibility, this demand to allow or encourage flourishing, that seeps into me as I attend to nature.
Fascinating interview with Mulder at the link. And your post clearly brings out issues of change, entanglement and accountability. Good post.