Land Ethic Essay ⋆ Environment Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

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The emergence of the specific ethical relationship to the earth known as the land ethic is attributed to Aldo Leopold, a forester and natural resource manager who lived and worked in the first half of the 20th century. The land ethic moves beyond economic valuation of natural resources to incorporate intrinsic values such as “love, respect, and admiration for land.”

Prior to Leopold’s construction of his land ethic, American conservation ethics had undergone two major iterations. J. Baird Callicott, a prominent environmental ethicist, describes the two preceding philosophies as, first, a Romantic-Transcendental Preservation Ethic, put forth by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau and expanded upon by John Muir in the early 1900s, and second, a Progressive-Utilitarian Resource Conservation Ethic, largely attributed to Gifford Pinchot and the U.S. Forest Service’s philosophy of a “best” or “highest” use of the natural resources possessed by humanity. Leopold’s Evolutionary-Ecological Land Ethic, Callicott states, was the third important ethical construction for describing man’s relationship with nature.

Leopold was trained as a forester in the tradition of Pinchot and initially adhered to Pinchot’s resource conservation ethic, but later in his career he diverged from this anthropocentric focus to develop his own ethic. His book, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There, published in 1949, outlines his developing philosophy in an essay called “The Land Ethic.” Leopold states, “There is as yet no ethic dealing with man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it.” This unification of land with animals and plants indicates Leopold’s burgeoning biocentrism: a focus on a respect for life itself. As Leopold put it: “the land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, animals, or collectively: the land.”

Leopold’s land ethic philosophy, proposed in the first half of the 20th century, was far ahead of his time and was not acknowledged for its applications to the field of environmental ethics and ecological thought until the 1970s and 1980s, when environmental ethics emerged as a discipline and the science of ecology shifted from viewing ecological systems as “climax equilibriums” to a more flexible model of dynamic stability.

A simplistic reading of the land ethic may place Leopold in an earlier ecological tradition that believed in ecological equilibriums and therefore proposed a respect for the land based on the astounding climactic balance ecosystems achieved. However, upon closer reading, it becomes apparent that Leopold was in fact rejecting the “balance of nature” paradigm for a “tangle of chains so complex as to seem disorderly, yet the stability of the system proves it to be a highly organized structure.”

The Land Ethic nd Conservation

Leopold’s land ethic, while contributing to conservation philosophy, does overlook many considerations relevant to the practice of modern conservation. The environmental ethicist Holmes Rolston III cites a few of these omissions in an essay on the land ethic, mentioning movements such as environmental justice, population growth in third world countries, the rights of indigenous peoples, and other human environment concerns brought to light in current conservation and development debates.

The land ethic can be applied to many of the problems faced by modern-day conservation, which has been criticized for overly subscribing to a romantic construction of man’s relationship to land. The modern conservation practice of trying to preserve “wilderness” by constructing unnatural barriers between human populations and the natural systems that support them ultimately results in conservation failure in many parts of the world. The land ethic includes people as citizens of a biological community.

Leopold fully acknowledges and supports the necessity of human alteration of ecological systems. His approach is both anthropocentric and biocentric; his ethic proposes an approach to land management that treats land use decisions and ecological alterations as actions that must be informed by ecological knowledge and a consideration for the long-term needs of both humans and the land upon which they depend.

Conservation has undergone many critiques for its treatment of marginalized peoples in the past few years. Proponents of the land ethic in the conservation movement argue that the land ethic empowers local populations. As Amy O’Neal writes, the land ethic “demonstrates a respect for biodiversity and the experience and knowledge of local peoples.” Employing the land ethic could help the conservation movement become more sustainable in the long run. Globalization of the land ethic via conservation organizations and land managers around the world may be the next step in the expansion of Leopold’s original philosophy.

Bibliography:

Baird Callicott, “Whither Conservation Ethics?” Conservation Biology (v.4/1, 1990);
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (Oxford University Press, 1949);
Carolyn Merchant, , Major Problems in American Environmental History, 2nd ed. (Houghton Mifflin, 2005);
Bryan Norton, “The Constancy of Leopold’s Land Ethic,” Conservation Biology (v.2/1, 1988);
Amy O’Neal et , “Human Economies, the Land Ethic and Sustainable Conservation,” Conservation Biology (v.9/1, 1995);
Holmes Rolston III, “The Land Ethic at the Turn of the Millennium,” Biodiversity and Conservation (v.9, 2000).