Inside the Mind of Rowan Hooper: The Shocking Truth Behind Togetherness Revealed
RH: I had taken for granted the intrinsic value in nature. I have always felt that’s not the strongest argument to make if you’re trying to make a policy change or something. I’ve also thought the strongest argument, in policy terms, is its instrumental value, to try to put a dollar figure on an ecosystem, in terms of what it does for us. And the environmental movement has also used that and put dollar values on what nature does for us.
The relational value—what it means to us and how we feel about it—is something that I hadn’t thought I could talk about as a scientist and an advocate for environmental change. But I’ve understood now, through the people I’ve read researching this book, that relational value is really important, and we need to develop it in order to care more about the world we’re living in and to make the changes that we were just talking about, to think about nature as something we’re all part of.
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