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David_J_Balan comments on The Value of Nature and Old Books - Less Wrong
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How about this: While nature may be "ours" to do with as we please, "we" are a gigantic bunch of people (including future people who will have interests in what we do now), and without a unanimous vote, messing with nature is going to be stealing it from somebody who was entitled to its being left alone.
Anything we do to just about anything has implications for other people (present and future). And hopefully we have a decent moral framework for dealing with that (and if we don't that's a whole 'nother problem). But I don't see how it applies to nature in particular, and the point of the post was to identify reasons (if any) for a privileged place for nature.
Most forms of property - I'm willing to consider nature property - have an apparent owner, and while behaving in certain ways with one's property has effects on others, among those effects isn't typically that one is stealing that property from those others. In the case of nature, the ownership seems to me to be collective and across time, such that doing anything to it will typically need to be justified to everyone in order to not suffer ethical pitfalls.
I agree that special moral issues arise when you are talking about valuable items to which property rights can't be assigned for one reason or another, and that nature is an important example of that.