Mark Sagoff, longtime University of Maryland philosopher who saw morality in nature, dies

Mark Sagoff, a philosopher and scholar who helped redefine concepts of environmental ethics, arguing that modern economic models have lost touch with intangible values such as cultural memory and the soul-soothing beauty of nature, died Dec. 12 at a hospital in Washington. He was 82.

His wife, Kendra Sagoff, confirmed the death but did not provide a cause.

Mr. Sagoff’s work over more than five decades sought to bridge the disciplines of economics, public planning and conservationism. At the core, were metaphysical questions that drew from centuries of philosophical inquest. What is the worth and moral standing, Mr. Sagoff asked, of a forest or an unspoiled strand of coast or a community’s way of life?

“I am troubled by … the idea that everything is for sale and nothing is sacred,” he said in a 1995 speech in Wyoming.

His books, essays and lectures helped broaden principles within the environmental movement and opened new fields of academic inquiry — including more than three decades leading the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy, first at the University of Maryland and then at George Mason University.

Mr. Sagoff also helped advance legal theories that envisioned cases on behalf of the natural world itself, a strategy that first captured his attention in the early 1970s with a suit by the Sierra Club against a proposed ski resort near Sequoia National Forest in California. The case reached the U.S. Supreme Court.

The high court, in a 4-3 decision, ruled in 1972 that the Sierra Club did not have standing. In a dissenting opinion, Justice William O. Douglas argued that the standing doctrine should allow environmental groups to sue on behalf of nature as “its legitimate spokesmen.” (The ski resort was never built.)

For Mr. Sagoff, the case was a defining moment in shaping his philosophical sweep.

“The Sequoia National Forest tells the developer that it wants a ski lift by a certain declivity of its hills and snowiness during the winter. … Old Man River might do something for a change, like make electricity, and not just keep on rolling along,” he wrote in a 1974 essay in the Yale Law Journal, offering a tongue-in-cheek appraisal that government agencies, lobbyists and business executives could protect nature.

“It is an incredible optimism,” he continued, “which assumes the guardians appointed to represent nature would take an environmentalist position.”

Mr. Sagoff did not oppose growth. In fact, he said housing and higher agricultural output were needed to keep pace with needs as the world’s population swells. He took issue with how policies were made.

Too often, he said, the due diligence on a project is limited to the expected checklist: studies of environmental impact, jobs created, traffic patterns and other issues. Ignored are notions that cannot be put into a spreadsheet, he argued. How does a plan fit with the soul of a place, the collective memory of the people, their ties to nature through rites and lore?

“The most valuable things are often useless,” he once said, asking how to put a price tag on an uninterrupted mountain view or the familiar flow of a river.

Yet Mr. Sagoff could be equally intolerant of activists who oppose everything at every turn. A balance is possible, he said. In his seminal philosophical treatise, “The Economy of the Earth: Philosophy, Law, and the Environment” (1988), Mr. Sagoff called out American environmentalists as often too dogmatic, claiming they see any encroachment on nature as unacceptable even if it helps the public good.

Mr. Sagoff enjoyed the unpredictable. He sprinkled his academic papers and books with pop culture references and quoted everything from Smokey Bear to New Yorker cartoons.

He followed his curiosity in different directions, too. Mr. Sagoff weighed in on the ethics of a U.S.-based company getting a patent on the blood cells of a Papua New Guinea man who had markers for leukemia but not the disease. (When the line is blurred between an invention and nature, “absurdity follows,” Mr. Sagoff said.)

He also commented on art forgeries, restorations and reproductions, positing that only the original piece carries the transcendent echoes of a specific time and place.

“You cannot love a person by pretending he or she is somebody else,” he wrote in the Journal of Philosophy in 1978. “You cannot appreciate a forgery by pretending it is a masterpiece.”

Mark Henry Sagoff was born in Boston and was raised in nearby Brookline, Massachusetts. His father was a former journalist who wrote a popular book, “ShrinkLits: Seventy of the World’s Towering Classics Cut Down to Size” (1971), that condensed great literature into bite-size verse, such as “Crime and Punishment” in 10 couplets. His mother was a homemaker and active in civic and political groups.

He received a degree in American studies and literature from Harvard University in 1963, and a master’s degree in philosophy from Columbia University in 1965. He was awarded his doctorate in philosophy in 1970 from the University of Rochester with his dissertation on the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, whose writings on metaphysics and aesthetics informed Mr. Sagoff’s work.

Mr. Sagoff taught at institutions including Princeton University and Cornell University before joining the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Maryland in 1979. The institute moved to George Mason in 2011. Dr. Sagoff retired in 2016.

His other published works include the 2004 book “Price, Principle, and the Environment,” in which he asserts that economic analyses are incapable of attaching a meaningful value to the environment.

Survivors include his wife of 39 years, the former Kendra Heymann; two children, Jared Sagoff and Amelia Sagoff; a sister; and two grandchildren.

In 1991, Dr. Sagoff began an essay by looking at the natural world through the prism of E.B. White’s children’s classic “Charlotte’s Web”: either as a place of wonder and virtue as the spider Charlotte sees in Wilbur the pig; or “only in the terms of the pork chops it provides” as the farmer Zuckerman once did.

“In nature we find perhaps, for the last time in history, objects commensurate with our capacity to wonder,” he wrote.