Maybe I was being too obscure, but did you read what I was replying to, as that was the point?
Yes, the suggestion that 'faith' could be used as an indication of value - my counterpoint being that everything in the game that doesn't demand physical production could be represented that way, from hockey rinks to scientific research. Human societies can persist well enough without either technology or theoretical knowledge, without cultural entertainments, or without currency systems - and a number do. We pursue them because they're considered valuable in themselves by developed societies, or because they can achieve ends those societies value.
I personally think that life is precious, as well as the environment, even though there can never be any scientific evidence pointing to one way or the other.
Obviously you can never have scientific evidence for a value judgment such as 'precious', but we can and do have plenty of scientific evidence of the utility of the environment, quite aside from the common-sense inference that - as the thing humans are situated in and that provides their food and shelter - it's the single most fundamental prerequisite for the persistence of human societies. Decomposition and nutrient cycling is needed both to prevent the buildup of organic waste and to provide soil fertility, and has been shown to be negatively affect by artificial land management. Food crops, and luxury crops like coffee and banana are suffering from greater incidences of disease following the removal of natural predators of pest organisms, and narrowing areas suitable for their cultivation resulting from climate change. Water pollution impacts the habitability of entire river systems and the incidence of human disease. Forest clearance for agriculture removes the plants that stabilise the soil, which can render the resulting fields unproductive within a few years and unable to regenerate either natural vegetation or crops.
And those are just a couple of the features that can be affected directly by people. Cycles humans can't presently affect detectably - such as nitrogen-fixing bacteria and rates of photosynthesis - are fundamental to keeping the planet friendly for multicellular life.
It's just that if you're trying to keep yourself alive, you're following a similarly unscientific dogma as the faith-based naturalists (who are trying to keep flora&fauna alive).
That seems to rest on a false notion of what science is. Science is a process for obtaining knowledge and applying to achieve an objective, not an objective itself. The objective can be 'unscientific' - the scientists are brought in to work out how to achieve it. If the objective a research is team is given is to protect a particular area, faunal group, watershed etc. it's immaterial what the motivation inspiring that protection is - the process of identifying effective methods to achieve that result is entirely scientific.
As this relates to naturalists, these are the people who conduct surveys to identify which species occur in an area, compile information (as in my case) to identify threats to their survival, document their ecological requirements, monitor their population status, and work to understand their relationships to other components of their ecosystems and their role in ecosystem functions such as provision of fresh water. All that is resolutely empirical - the same frog community is in a region whatever the naturalists' or anyone else's beliefs about those frogs' value.
