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Our cultural traditions do not lend themselves especially well to arguments that nature should be protected for its own sake, despite strongly promoting the intuition that it should. So we use the interests of future humans as a proxy for the interests of the planet. It’s not rigorous, but it’s right: we shouldn’t just write off half our fellow species because we’re struggling to spell out why not.
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What We Owe Tomorrow’s People, for the RSA comment blog
By Marek Kohn on Friday, July 15th, 2011
