he natural world as possible until such change is brought about, one way or another. 7. It tells us that society values property and the higher standard of living through technology over the natural world and any rights the natural world may be entitled to even though the majority of society on a personal level is sympathetic to the cause of radical environmentalists in theory. The American people are not accustomed to thinking of such nonhuman entities as mountain lions, forests, and rivers as exploited groups whose 9th amendments rights can be violated. From the perspective of the radical environmentalists movement, this state of affairs is exactly the problem. In the ante-bellum South, people were not accustomed the thinking of slaves as human beings who had any claim to the protection of the law. We now find this position both repugnant and ridiculous. In the future, so goes the biocentric argument, we will feel the same toward contemporary society's refusal to extend legal and ethical standing to the "deer people" and the "tree people". Radical environmentalism is best understood as an attempt to enlarge the circle of legal and ethical standing (9th amendment rights) to include other species and even entire ecosystems. Using this theory as a 9th amendment weapon to extend the rights to the natural world can only, in my opinion, happen when society as whole, i.e. in large numbers, gets behind the biocentric movement to the magnitude it got behind the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 60's and 70's.8. Much of the breakdown of civilization is that we seem to rely on a totalization of values, values represented as universal, applicable to everyone, at all times. Through totalized values, organized societies have at their command a medium through which to dictate the kind of human behavior that enhances the power of those in control. Whether those values result in people plowing a field, working in a factor...
