Environmental Conservation: Economics, Ecology, and Ethics

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Abstract
This paper argues that the comparative lack of concern for Nature conservation in the ‘Western World’ has been a product of its economic development experience, the nature of its economic systems and economic organizations (both market and centrally controlled ‘state socialist’), and its centralized political systems as well as its Judaic-Christian value system. But some change in attitude has occurred in recent years, and there is now far more readiness than formerly to consider the economic and direct benefits to Man of conservation of living resources (see, for example, the World Conservation Strategy), and growing interest in the possible ethical rights of other sentient (and perhaps even non-sentient) beings. In general, however, economists remain unsympathetic to ecologists who do not subscribe to their economic value-systems.