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The whole against the individual

If only the whole counts, then the individual, humans included, may be sacrificed in the name of balance: this is an 'environmental fascism'.

Objects to Ecocentrism

Regan, Sagoff · The Case for Animal Rights · 1983

1. Ecocentrism places worth in the whole, the integrity of the biotic community, of which individuals are but members.
2. But then an individual may be sacrificed whenever it harms the balance: culling en masse the animals of an overabundant species, or even, if the logic holds, treating an overlarge human population as an excess for the 'health' of the whole.
3. Yet we hold that the sentient individual, its suffering, its life, counts for itself, and not merely as a cog in a system: treating beings as mere means in the service of the whole offends what is firmest in morality.

Therefore So worth cannot reside in the whole alone: an acceptable ethics must first protect sentient individuals, even if that makes ecological integrity only one major good among others, not the supreme good.