Aldo Leopold was born in 1887 and spend his childhood
exploring the Mississippi River valley that dominated his hometown of
Burlington Iowa. He moved out east as he
entered adulthood where he enrolled in the Yale Forestry school where he got a master’s
degree in forestry. From their he got
his first job working for the newly formed U.S. Forest Service and moved to the
Southwest in New Mexico where he become supervisor of the Carson National
Forest. Eventually Leopold and his family
moved back to the Midwest, to Madison Wisconsin. In Madison, he eventually went to work for
the University of Wisconsin where he taught Game Management.
The Leopold family purchased an abandoned
farm in Sauk County on the banks of the Wisconsin River where they converted an
old chicken coop into what would affectionately become known by the family as the
“shack” – the place where the family would retreat to and spend time restoring
the land that had been degraded by previous land use practices. It was from his lifetime of experiences of
living and working with the land that Leopold based his book THE SAND COUNTYALMANAC on.
The ALMANAC is a collection of essays Leopold had
written. In Part I – The Sand County Almanac,
he shares writings from his time at the “shack”. Part II – The Quality of Landscape, is a
collection of experiences from the various places he lived, worked and played throughout
his life. The essays in Part III – A Taste
for Country, are a synthesis of the previous two parts that explain how there
is more to land than simply providing us a place to spend our leisure time and
that by paying attention to the land there is much we can learn. And
the concluding Part IV – The Upshot, is where Leopold brings it all together to
explain his ideas about why our culture needs to develop a land ethic and what
that ethic entailed. It is perhaps a
poetic tragedy that Leopold died from a heart attack helping a neighbor fight a
wild fire next to the “shack” property in 1948, before the ALMANAC was
published in 1949.
When god-like Odysseus returned from the wars in Troy, he
hanged all on one rope a dozen slave-girls of his house-hold, whom he suspected
of misbehavior during his absence. This
hanging involved no question of propriety. The girls were property. The
disposal of property was then, as now, a matter of expediency, not of right and
wrong.
An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom action in
the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically is a differentiation of
social from anti-social conduct.
There is as yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to land
and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus'
slave-girls, is still property. The land relation is still strictly economic,
entailing privileges but no obligations.
All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that
the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. His
instincts prompt him to compete for his place in that community, but his ethics
prompt him also to co-operate (perhaps in order that there may be a place to
compete for).
In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to
plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and
also respect for the community as such.
One basic weakness in a conservation system based wholly on
economic motives is that most members of the land community have no economic
value.
To sum up: a system of conservation based solely on economic
self-interest is hopelessly lopsided. It tends to ignore, and thus eventually
to eliminate, many elements in the land community that lack commercial value,
but that are (as far as we know) essential to its healthy functioning. It
assumes, falsely, I think, that the economic parts of the biotic clock will
function without the uneconomic parts. It tends to relegate to government many
functions eventually too large, too complex, or too widely dispersed to be
performed by government.
We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see,
feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.
Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy
flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals. Food chains are the
living channels which conduct energy up ward; death and decay return it to the
soil. The circuit is not closed; some energy is dissipated in decay, some is
added by absorption from the air, some is stored in soils, peats, and
long-lived forests; but it is a sustained circuit, like a slowly augmented
revolving fund of life. There is always a net loss by downhill wash, but this
is normally small and offset by the decay of rocks. It is deposited in the
ocean and, in the course of geological time, raised to form new lands and new
pyramids.
A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological
conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility
for the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for
self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this
capacity.
It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land
can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land and a high regard for
its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic
value; I mean value in the philosophical sense.
The 'key-log' which must be moved to release the
evolutionary process for an ethic is simply this: quit thinking about decent
land-use as solely an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what
is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient.
A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty
of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
The mechanism of operation is the same for any ethic: social
approbation for right actions: social disapproval for wrong actions.
