People have always had a religious or quasi-religious reverence for nature. In modern times, some people have started to see nature more as an enemy to be conquered than as a god to be worshiped. Such people point out that uncontrolled nature causes a tremendous amount of human suffering (to say nothing of all the misery that it causes other creatures), and that vast improvements to human welfare have largely been the result of us ceasing to love and fear nature and starting to control it.
There are several common responses to this. One response is that it is solipsistic for humans to measure the value of nature in terms of what is and is not good for us. This strikes me as right only insofar as it ignores the welfare of non-human creatures who have enough going on in terms of consciousness and/or sentience to matter; I think the objection would be without merit if one were to broaden the scope of concern to something like all creatures, present and future, capable of having experiences (who else is there to care about?). A second response is that seeing ourselves as highly effective lords over nature leads to dangerous overconfidence, which leads to costly mistakes in how we deal with nature. This is a very fair point, but what it really amounts to is a claim that we shouldn't underestimate the enemy, not that the enemy is really a friend. Anyway, the solution to that problem is to become better rationalists and get better at being skeptical regarding our powers, not to retreat into quasi-mystical Gaia worship. A third response is that getting into a "conquer nature" frame of mind puts people into a "conquer everything" frame of mind and leads to aggression against other people. This might have merit historically, but that problem is also best confronted directly, in this case by more effectively promulgating liberal humanistic values.
So what, if anything, is left to the idea that there is something special about nature worthy of particular regard? And by special I mean something beyond the fact that many people just plain enjoy it the way they enjoy lots of other things that nevertheless have no claim to any special status. I would say that the main thing that makes nature special in this sense is that when you are in nature or contemplating nature, you can be confident that the resulting thoughts and feelings are uncontaminated by all of the (visible and invisible) ideas and biases and assumptions that are present in your particular time and place. When you look at a waterfall and you like it, you can be pretty sure that: (i) it wasn't put there by anyone with an agenda; (ii) you weren't manipulated into liking it by contemporary ideology or social pressure or persuasive advertising or whatever; and (iii) the thoughts that you think while contemplating it aren't the thoughts anyone is trying to lead you into. In other words, nature is a way of guaranteeing that there is a little corner of experience that we are instinctively drawn to and that we can be confident doesn't represent anyone else's attempt to control us. And since other people are trying to control us all the time, even in relatively free societies (all the more so in oppressive ones), this is of real value.
I think the same basic point applies to some other things besides nature. Why do people still read old books* even when the knowledge in them has been refined and improved-upon in the meantime? In many subjects, we don't. Nobody learns geometry by reading Euclid, because there would be no point. But people do still read ancient works of philosophy. It seems to me that one good reason to do so is that for all the ways that these works have been analyzed and surpassed in the intervening years, the reader can be sure that what is written there is not the product of manipulation by the forces that are at work in the reader's own time and place. So it represents another way to gain valuable freedom and distance.
*Here I'm talking about non-fiction books. The merits of old creative works even when the innovations in them have become widespread in newer works is a different story. Often a point like the one in this post still applies, and sometimes the old stuff really is still just the best.
About dividing nature, it does look like a good ideal, but realistically we need a way to resolve disputes. Unanimous agreement is very rare.
My own idea was to assign to everyone a personal chunk of nature, which was small enough to not be commercially useful on its own, and if people were sufficiently certain of never gaining more/new chunks (e.g., we forbid sales, single ownership of many chunks, and corporate ownership). Of course realistically nothing like that's going to happen either.
Re: future people. Your example is of a fetus, which will become an adult if we don't interfere with it, as opposed to unconcieved "potential" people - the vast mass of "future people". The example of drinking and smoking, again, is an act done by the mother - who chose to create the new child - and so I don't think it should be extended to my liability towards the child (before that child exists).
My last paragraph was poorly worded, here's a restatement. Suppose I value purely potential future people (not foetuses, for the sake of argument). These future people, almost entirely, would not be my own children.
Suppose I act now to improve their lives in case they come to exist later. This would tend to increase the amount of such new people who are actually created. The more resources I create for future people to consume, the more people will be able to live in the future on these resources. Increasing population is not a goal of mine, so I prefer to stop this early and not act in favor of "future people" at all.
Yes - which is why I privilege the status quo (that is, what the situation would be absent human action) in cases where such agreement can't be reached. For a smaller-scale example of collective property: I have a roommate, and our apartment has one bathroom. If he decides he'd like to keep koi in the bathtub, and I don't approve of this idea, then even though we have equal stakes in the bathtub, the status quo (a non-koi-containing state of affairs) ought to win. We would need to agree to make a change from the statu... (read more)