An adequate environmental ethic must eventually provide answers to all three of these questions. In recent work by environmentalists, considerable attention has been paid to the first of these questions. Here the debate has centered around the question of whether individual animals, species, plants, rivers, etc. have moral weight (i.e., whether we should give moral consideration to the question of their well-being or continued flourishing). Sometimes this question is posed in relation to individuals (e.g., this specific plant) and sometimes it is posed in relation to species (e.g., the spotted owl). In the next section of this introduction, we shall examine a number of specific answers to these questions.