On self-interest, justice and why biodiversity protection is more than prudence

"We are sawing off the branch we are sitting on." Germany's then Federal Environment Minister Svenja Schulze said this in 2019, when the World Biodiversity Council IPBES presented its first global report. It captures a widespread way of thinking about the decline of biological diversity: as a question of self-interest. Whoever destroys nature harms themselves. Whoever protects it acts prudently.

The environmental ethicist Uta Eser has shown in a remarkable essay in the journal Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte (APuZ, January 2026) why this line of argument, plausible as it is, does not suffice. It is useful because it justifies nature conservation without a moral imperative. But it has a blind spot: it obscures who actually bears responsibility — and who bears the consequences.

"Sawing off a branch that others are sitting on is not merely stupid — it is irresponsible."

The philosopher Hans Jonas put it precisely long ago: the problem with the branch metaphor is that it leaves unclear who the "we" is that sits and saws. In reality, some do the sawing — and others do the falling. Eser calls this the collective rhetoric of the biodiversity discourse: when "everyone" is responsible, very quickly no one feels obliged. The philosopher Hannah Arendt put it aptly: where all are guilty, no one is.

Why is this relevant to what we do at Nature Values? Because we grapple with precisely this tension every day. The German impact mitigation regulation under Sections 13 ff. of the Federal Nature Conservation Act (BNatSchG) is an instrument that assigns responsibility concretely: whoever intervenes in nature and landscape — a wind farm, a power line, a road — is obliged to compensate for it. Not "society". Not "all of us". The party causing the impact.

This is more than regulation. It is a structured principle of justice: those who intervene bear the costs of restoration. Our business model makes it possible to convert these costs efficiently and with high quality into real ecological enhancement — on sites like our pilot project in Ramin, where intensively farmed arable land is becoming species-rich extensive meadow and field copses.

Eser opens up a third perspective that goes beyond prudence and justice: the question of the good life. Section 1 of the Federal Nature Conservation Act names not only the functioning of the natural balance but explicitly also the "diversity, character and beauty" of nature. This triad, Eser argues, underlines that people do not depend on nature in existential terms alone — they maintain relationships with it that elude a pure logic of use.

This is exactly the idea behind Andy Warhol's sentence that has accompanied us from the beginning: "I think having land and not ruining it is the most beautiful art anybody could ever want to own." It is not only about ecosystem services. It is about something harder to measure — and worth protecting precisely for that reason.

Nature conservation as a matter of prudence, as a question of justice and as an option for the good life: these are not competing arguments. They complement each other. And all of them speak for no longer treating the decline of biological diversity as an abstract problem of humanity, but as a concrete mandate — for companies, investors, landowners and political actors.

Source: Uta Eser, "Warum Biodiversität schützen? Eine umweltethische Betrachtung", in: Aus Politik und Zeitgeschichte (APuZ), vol. 76, no. 1–5/2026, Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, pp. 4–8.
The article is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 and freely available at www.bpb.de/apuz.