I'm not sure we could be friends, Baxter.

In his piece, Baxter argues that any sort of environmental remediation should be enacted after a thorough analysis of the trade-offs to human satisfaction that it will inevitably cause. I have two primary objections to his entire thought process. First, I believe he makes a mistake in only seeing things (specifically animals, plants, ecosystems) in terms of their instrumental value to human beings. He does not allow for the notion that some members of our planet besides us may have intrinsic value. (I will not elaborate too much on this: we've spent considerable time discussing it.) Besides this fundamental difference between us, I would also argue against Baxter on the grounds that even if things only had value in terms of their instrumental value to people, he does not understand fully the instrumental value some things may offer.

I thought of the concept of biophilia, which seems to argue that humans have an evolutionarily programmed interest in the well-being of non-human members of our Earth community. We derive pleasure from seeing megafauna in the wild; we make scientific breakthroughs with the fluids of rare plants. He uses the example of DDT, which he sees as having benefits for humans but negative consequences for other species. I would have to argue that DDT also has negative affects for humans: if we did not outlaw it based on its affect on animals, it could have accumulated in the biosphere to the point where it infiltrated our own fat cells. The penguins were an indicator of the bad affects of a generally toxic substance. (Even though this is my argument against his example, it strikes me as a flaw in his piece that he goes on to argue "what is good for humans is, in many respects, good for penguins and pine trees..." - without acknowledging his own example of DDT, good for humans, as an exception, since even he acknowledged it as being bad for animals.)

In his conclusion, Baxter claims that controlling pollution is costly, but I would argue (and I believe Hilary French would agree) that the best means of controlling pollution are avoidance techniques. (It might actually save money to prevent pollution.) The expected "cost" that many corporate think tanks assign to pollution control is really only in terms of lost profit, which is only a marker of money. (Baxter and I agree, at least, on the irrelevance of money.) There wouldn't be any additional use of resources to prevent pollution. Even if the lost profit happened, it might actually serve Baxter's goal of minimal sharing of wealth, as a means of redistribution, since large corporations that have an unbalanced amount of money anyway would be the ones losing out.