Environmental Value refers to the evaluative importance that organisms, species, ecosystems, environmental systems, relations, histories, and possibilities acquire through biological, cognitive, social, cultural, and moral forms of organisation.
In APS, environmental value is distinct from biological significance. Biological significance concerns the difference environmental conditions make to viability-oriented organisation. Environmental value concerns the wider importance that organisms, ecological relations, environmental systems, historical inheritances, and future possibilities may acquire through increasingly complex forms of evaluation.
Environmental value need not be reduced to immediate usefulness, nor does it require value to exist independently of all evaluative relations. APS treats environmental value as relationally real: it emerges through the interaction between evaluative agents and features of the world that genuinely support, constrain, shape, preserve, or foreclose forms of organised persistence and future possibility.
Environmental value therefore provides an important bridge between biological significance and environmental ethics. It helps explain why reflective agents may come to care about species, ecosystems, rivers, landscapes, climatic systems, and future environmental conditions even when those concerns extend beyond immediate organismic interests.