This paper recognises the many contributions to work on environmental values while arguing that some reconsideration of elicitation practices is warranted. It argues that speaking and thinking about certain environmental values, particularly ethical expressions, are ill-matched with the affectively neutral, direct question-answer formats standard to willingness-to-pay and survey methods. Several indirect, narrated, and affectively resonant elicitation tasks were used to provide study participants with new opportunities to express their values. Coded results demonstrate that morally resonant, image- based, and narrative-style elicitation (...) tasks help respondents articulate a broader range of noncost and nonutilitarian environmental values. However, it was found that elicitations of this kind are most useful when presented in a affectively subtle and noncontroversial form. Several suggestions for synthesising these methods with more structured forms are offered. (shrink)

Environmentalists who seek to protect wild nature, biodiversity and so on for its own sake manifest a disposition to value the interesting at least on par with the useful. This disposition toward the interesting, which provides the affective and cognitive context for the discovery of intrinsic values in nature and the elaboration of ecocentric ethics, does not arise simply from learning about nature but is part of a more general socially inculcated cultural system. Nature connoisseurship exhibits formal parallels with art (...) connoisseurship. The abstraction-oriented cultural system which prizes 'disinterested interest' is characteristic of culturally rich fractions (or subdivisions) of the middle class in modern Western societies. Valuing nature for its own sake (like valuing, for its own sake, the domination of nature) is not a 'natural' response to nature but a disciplined cultural accomplishment. (shrink)