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Ecological Ethics and Politics By H. J. McCloskey Totowa, New Jersey: Rowman and Littlefield, 1983, 167 pp., £27.50

More than half a century has passed since G. E. Moore asked his readers to compare the value of a beautiful world devoid of human consciousness with an equally beautiful world which included the wealth of human experience and awareness. Moore's hypothetical comparison has acquired a poignant pertinency for the present day, where the choice is made harder by the recognition that there may be a conflict between the beauty of the world—in particular the preservation of wilderness areas and of natural species—and the interests and welfare of human beings. Where, then, does value lie? And where does the balance of good and evil fall? With those who advance man's prosperity by 'making the desert bloom like a rose' ? Or with those peoples, like the former nomadic inhabitants of Israel or the North American Indians, who have lived on the surface of the planet earth leaving their passage and stay unrecorded in the ecology and topography of their land? The immediate intuitive response to these questions is likely to be that the balance of good must be on the side of beauty, nature and endangered species and that domination by machines, the concrete wastelands of many cities, the distancing from the coercion of nature, must be evil. But McCloskey ranges himself with those, like Frey, who challenge this and against those, like Aldo Leopold and Richard and Valerie Routley, who have tried to offer a justification for the notion of non-human values—values inherent in nature itself. If this sounds initially implausible, the desire for some such notion is understandable. Concern about pollution of the atmosphere and ocean, leading perhaps to the death of the planet, lies behind the search for a new meta-ethic capable of explaining the value of natural phenomena independently of human needs or desires.