Talk of values has become ubiquitous in conservation and, more broadly, in conceptualisations of and discourses about human relations with the living world. The recently released Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) Values Assessment makes the overarching point that the global biodiversity crisis is underlain by narrowly market-based valuations of the natural world (IPBES Secretariat 2022). Its authors call for a broader assessment and inclusion of intrinsic, instrumental and relational values in policymaking (ibid.). Within the conservation community, there has also been a surge in interest in values, as reflected in the growing number of publications that attempt to capture conservationists’ values as well as exploring the role of values in conservation thought and practice (e.g. Manfredo et al. 2017; Vucetich et al. 2021). These studies and policy recommendations fit within the longer-standing field of environmental values – a field which has produced large volumes of scholarship in disciplines as varied as Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology and Economics.

For all its recent success, this growth in academic and policy discourse on values has often suffered from significant conceptual limitations. In many cases, the meaning of the word ‘values’ is contradictory or confused, a point already made (in the context of common speech) by American Pragmatist John Dewey nearly one hundred years ago (Dewey 1939). Recent studies in environmental and conservation values could benefit substantially from a deeper engagement with decades of philosophical work that articulates, clarifies and delineates the various concepts that these studies deploy. Another conspicuous absence in this recent literature is unstructured or semi-structured ethnographic analysis; most studies have used either large-sample quantitative methods, semiquantitative ones such as Q methodology, or ‘snapshot’ qualitative methods like one-off interviews. Yet, as geographers and anthropologists have long known, it is only by paying careful and sustained attention to the cultural, political and ecological realities that shape people’s lives that we can attain a more meaningful understanding of what those people think and feel.

The present thesis is an effort to begin to address these problems and limitations. Its mode of inquiry is threefold: philosophical, quantitative and ethnographic. At times, these methodologies are used in isolation. In other cases, I jointly use philosophy and ethnography to approach a single question; thereby, I hope to go some way toward satisfying recent calls for environmental philosophy to become field-based or at least field-informed (James 2015, 155-156; Norton and Sanbeg 2020). This thesis thereby brings methods and motivations familiar to human and more-than-human geographers – the empirically informed study of social, political and biophysical processes, as they unfold in particular places and at various scales – to bear on the ethical questions that have of late preoccupied biologists, social scientists and policymakers.

In the first research chapter (Chapter 3), I embark on the inevitably bold task of articulating what conservation is. In proposing my own definition, I show that conservation is unintelligible without due consideration of questions of value. I also argue that whether a movement, project or motivation can be considered conservation hinges on the timescale on which value is apprehended. Having proposed an understanding of what conservation is, the next chapter (Chapter 4) draws on responses to a global survey of conservationists to map statistical correlations between conservationists’ values and their personal and professional characteristics. Results demonstrate that factors including where conservationists have worked and their childhood experiences are linked to their values regarding the right roles of people, science, capitalism and nonhuman entities in conservation.

My research then takes a turn from these relatively abstract (Chapter 3) and large-sample (Chapter 4) inquiries toward field-based, contextualised approaches, drawing on several months of ethnographic observation in Chile/Wallmapu as well as forty-one semi-structured interviews (described in Chapters 5 and 6). Combining philosophical reasoning with these empirical sources, in Chapter 7 I show that the recently proposed – and widely used – category of relational values lacks conceptual and practical worth. My argument is that it is not possible to distinguish relational values from more familiar types of values, namely held, instrumental and intrinsic ones. To make matters worse, in attempting to delineate their new category, proponents of relational values have been compelled to silence or downplay the relational qualities in these more familiar types. The final research chapter (Chapter 8) takes an on-the-ground approach to the question of what values do in society: I explore how diverse anthropocentric and non-anthropocentric values have shaped Chile’s recent social uprising and ongoing Constitutional reform (henceforth ‘constituent process’). By disentangling questions of value from notions and practices of rights, I question the conceptual validity and ethical desirability of the constitutional proposal to protect the putative rights of nature – and suggest an alternative based on humans’ rights to conserve their environments. This alternative, despite being based on humans’ rights, can be motivated by non-anthropocentric beliefs as well as anthropocentric ones.

Taken as a whole, this thesis showcases what philosophical and geographical methods can contribute to current attempts to conceptualise more-than-human relations and environmental values. The first two research chapters are fairly constructive: I propose a new articulation of what conservation is and (together with my collaborators) I map statistical correlations between conservationists’ values and their characteristics. It will be interesting to see whether and how new research contextualises my definition in the broader matrix of articulations of what conservation is, as well as what the statistical associations we identify consist of (in other words, what shapes conservationists’ values, and what is shaped by them). The second half of the thesis, generally being more deconstructive, aims to redirect our thinking away from two recently widespread ideas: relational values and the rights of nature. And yet, the need to promote relational and non-anthropocentric thinking is real enough. I therefore encourage philosophers, geographers and others interested in understanding more-than-human relations to consider what new or existing notions might satisfy that need while avoiding the problems I identify with relational values and the rights of nature.