Does Space Need Environmentalists?

“Everywhere that humans go, they cause ecological problems. The environmental history is clear about this,” Daniel Capper, an adjunct professor of philosophy at the Metropolitan State University of Denver, who is a vocal proponent of such a movement, recently told me. Capper, who has a Walt Whitman beard and speaks with a genial kind of urgency, argues that commonly-held beliefs about the value of land and wilderness on Earth should hold just as much sway in space.