The main reason that Colorado State University exists, certainly the science side of the campus, is to apply science for human benefits. Exactly here is where I am urging care. For nature has intrinsic as well as instrumental value. Now and again, nature is a resource for spirit. Over the centuries people have learned how to build fires, make plows, axes, saws, plow fields, plant crops.
Humans redirect their resources extensively to rebuild their environments.
They do so with the know-how of transmissible cultures. What you get in a college education is the best of this know-how about to use nature resourcefully. Resourceful use generates value, exploiting natural things. Natural resource decisions have been long considered to be primarily economic decisions. But maybe the resource orientation, the focus of your education, is only a half truth and afterward misguided, if it has left you convinced that man is the only measure of things, and that everything should be defined in relation to us.