: Recently a number of influential academic environmentalists have spoken out against wilderness, most prominently William Cronon and J. Baird Callicott. This is odd, given that these writers seem to support two cornerstone positions of environmentalism as it has developed over the past twenty years: first, the view articulated within environmental ethics that wild, nonhuman nature, or at least some parts of it, has intrinsic or inherent value; second, the understanding developed within conservation biology that we have entered a period (...) of massive anthropogenic biodiversity loss and that landscape-level habitat preservation is essential for combating this. I argue here that Cronon and Callicott are wrong. In fact, an ethics of respect for nonhuman nature and an informed, scientific understanding of what is necessary to preserve it do strongly support increased wilderness preservation. (shrink)

There is substantial evidence that we are currently in a period of rapid and significant change in forest values. Some have charged that managing forests in ways that are responsive to diverse and changing forest values is the main challenge faced by public forest managers. To tackle this challenge, we need to address the following questions: What is the nature of forest values? That is, can all forest values be reduced to a single dimension, as assumed in utilitarian-based traditional forestry (...) and economics, or are these values multidimensional and incommensurate? What specific values are involved? What is the structure of forest values? That is, how are they related to each other in value systems? How and why have forest values changed over time? and What do changing forest values imply for ecosystem management approaches? This article discusses key issues related to these questions. (shrink)