The Justification of a Life-Centered Perspective
             Santa Cruz is a city known for its beach access and huge redwoods. These redwoods have lately come into an environmental debate regarding their co-existence with the lime kiln, and the subsequent new growth dominance of the redwoods over the kiln. In this 'nature v. culture' debate, arguments range as to whether or not the redwoods should overtake the kiln or be driven back by human intervention. Such human intervention looks to sustain what is to be considered a historical monument in the cement-creating kiln that helped re-build San Francisco in the 1906 quake. But human intervention not only determines the kiln's survival, it also establishes a practice of 'culture's' dominance over 'nature'. This reasoning - that humans are intrinsically more valuable than non-humans - details American idealism, which dominates the social and political arenas that control human society (and, thus nature). In laying out and representing the opposing ethical arguments, an answer will reasonably come forth as to whether or not this dominance of nature by culture is 'right', or whether our dominance over nature is just a manifestation of what humans want for their own interest. In doing so, anthropocentric views are reasoned to be unjust and nature is concluded to have equal beings with equal rights. Being such, the redwoods in Santa Cruz must be permitted to grow uninhibited and overtake the lime kilns.
             The essential reasons for the current excessiveness of man's interaction with Nature (the reasons for the "destruction of Nature") and/or reasons for the inefficiency of the current normative interference (i.e., the environmental protection law) should be equated with the dominant anthropocentric cultural paradigm of the western cultures oriented towards an un-limited material progress. Anthropocentricism understands humans ...