What are muskrats worth? This is a complicated question. We can easily calculate their value as furs. About ten million muskrats are trapped every year in North America. Pelts bring an average of between three and four dollars each, so we could declare the value of muskrats to be between $30 million and $40 million a year.
And muskrats make a more general ecological contribution, one they share with every species of plant and animal no matter how rare: they contribute to the biological diversity of their native ecosystem. Their presence puts competitive pressure on plants, on other plant-eating animals, and on the predators that hunt them. For example, many plants have evolved chemical defenses against herbivores. Muskrats might selectively feed on plants without defenses while leaving those with chemical weapons alone. In time these feeding habits could create whole populations with effective chemical protection. Other plant eaters might also be pressured into more selective feeding in order to escape competition with the gnawing incisors of muskrats.
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The benefits we derive from nature have to be looked at broadly. We can save natural things because we think they are pretty or because we can make fur coats from their hides. We can save them because experiencing wild places and wild creatures can transform us, change the way we think about our lives and our place in the world.
An ecological view of life and our place in it, Norton writes, recognizes that humans are evolved animals and that evolution, the process that created us, “works within almost unbelievably complex and interrelated organic systems.” Our awareness of that complexity should lead us to approach nature with humility and to seek harmony with it. “It is good, in this view,” Norton writes, “to do things in a way that mimics nature’s patterns; it is good to promote the natural processes that . . . produce greater diversity; it is good to introduce alterations slowly enough to allow nature to react.”
