“Forty percent of people will say: ‘That’s nice. Why would it matter? We’re not eating them.”

Indeed, but according to Mireya Navarro and this Sunday’s New York Times, organic and pesticide-free flowers are the new “it” thing in environmentally-friendly agriculture. While I may not be terribly interested in flowers or horticulture, (I’m a megafauna kind of guy) this article highlights an awful lot about environmental ethics and the new greening movement.The justifications for pursuing certain issues and protecting certain species are generally divided into three categories: direct-use, indirect-use, and intrinsic value.

 

INTRINSIC: Positing the intrinsic value of an organism or place is the most straightforward reason to help or save it, even if it’s somewhat out of line with Western culture - “this thing, X, deserves to be saved, and therefore we should should save it.”

 

DIRECT-USE: Direct-use is similarly straightforward, if less awe-inspiring: this plant, animal or space is useful, and therefore should be kept conserved and maintained for our future use.

 

INDIRECT-USE: This thing is not apparently useful to us yet, but is important to our spiritual well-being in the world, is important to the survival of those things which are directly useful to us, or has the potential to serve some sort of unimagined use to us. Indirect-use value is most often attributed in mainstream media to the rainforest, in which, the story goes, lie untold-of riches and unimagined miracle-cures.

 

However, it is not often that anything more than direct-use values make it into the public discourse about conservationism - the debate about the polar bear, for instance, is not so much about whether the polar bear has the right to live, as whether the emotional value of the polar bear’s existence outweighs the value of oil - still all about what value it has to us.So the concept of “organic” flowers begs the question: “Who eats flowers anyway?”The answer is “Probably no one,” but the pesticides are a different story - whether they’re in the air you breathe or the vegetables you eat, or absorbed through the skin of the impoverished field workers who picked and processed the flowers along the path to your table. Maybe no one out there is really eating flowers, but maybe you’d feel better about your purchase just the same.

 

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/03/fashion/03flowers.html

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