The environment and the background of human life. Nature, facts and values

The chapter explores the importance of an attitude towards the natural environment understood as the wider and, to a certain degree, independent background of our practices. The independence and the distance established by animals and environments is a kind of fact which articulates our overall conceptual dimension: it is in fact the background which makes sense of the importance and of the depth of our inhabiting the world, of our encounters with others, and of many activities. It is a fact which concerns us: we can account for it only by deploying the overall scheme of human values (in the sense in which Wiggins uses this expression). The reality of the environment, of animals, and nature is not detached from the overall pattern of values, from the sense of importance and depth it expresses. We can unfold the measure of this reality only by unfolding the measure of what matters to us