Nature protection as moral duty: The ethical trend in the Russian conservation movement

Conclusion

Shortly after the October Revolution, Semenov-Tian-Shanskii prophetically remarked that voices in defense of nature in Russia under the new regime might be nothing more than “miserable voices crying in the wilderness.”⁵² Alas, this turned out to be all too true: by the end of the 1930s the voices of the aestheticethical approach had become silent in the wilderness of “socialist construction.”

Nevertheless, I would not like to conclude my talk on this mournful note. Instead I would like to emphasize that, although the history of Russian environmental ethics turned out to be tragically brief, its basic ideas seem to me to be still relevant and important today. What I consider perhaps most important is the idea that is best expressed in Semenov-Tian-Shanskii's words: “freedom is necessary for nature as it is necessary for humans.”⁵³ This outlook calls us to surrender our pretensions to ontological superiority over the rest of nature. It calls us to recognize that nature is valuable in itself, and to live in harmonious cooperation with nature. *** DIRECT SUPPORT *** A8402064 00008