ALDO LEOPOLD'S LAND ETHIC
Jud Evans

UCLAN

Foreword.
The Land Ethic of Aldo Leopold is a beautifully crafted spiritually uplifting testimonial to nature-centred living. Although resonating with a poetic lyriscism it is also logical in its scientific analysis of the importance of changing humanity's attitude towards the land and provides for us a revealling explanation of the biotic mechanism that underlies nature. It is premised on the idea that the separation of humans and nature is not an irreconcilable state but that humans are as much part of and dependent upon the biotic community as the soil, the water and the flora and fauna. Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic is extentionalist in that it broadens the idea of a community to the land. The intention of this paper is to explore why he seeks to promote this community of ethical interests, and exactly what comprises the concept of 'community,' and whether it is as the question asks: a reasonable development of our ethical thinking.

The question of whether Leopold's notions are reasonable referred hinges on who is making the judgement regarding the meaning of what the abstraction 'reasonable' entails in relation to Leopold's views. The quality of some theory or behaviour, which is considered plausible or acceptable or reasonable to one person - may seem entirely unreasonable or even unacceptable to the next man or woman.

I will deal with this question of reasonableness in the following manner.

(1.) An introduction to Aldo Leopold the man.

(2.) An Outline of the ideas of Community in the Land Ethic.

(3.) Questions of Reasonableness and Unreasonableness.

(4.) Conclusion.

An introduction to Aldo Leopold the Man.

Aldo Leopold was born in Burlington, Iowa, on January 11 1887 by the banks of the Mississippi. His intimate relationship with nature and the wild began in his early childhood. From an early age he went hunting and the blood sport became a lifetime pleasure and interest for him to which he devoted the greater part of his life. He loved the wilderness and his fascination with hunting initiated and orientated his future career. In his youth his outlook was almost exclusively anthropocentric. In 1929 he enlisted in the Forestry Service and spent month-long trips in the wilderness of Wisconsin mapping new areas of the forest. These experiences brought him to understand the mechanism of the balance of nature and that predators and their prey were an inherent component of the balance of nature and in 1936 he wrote an article in 'American Forrest' in which he said that all predators have a value - not just those we want to shoot.

An outline of the ideas of community in the Land Ethic.

The fundamental tenet of Leopold's Land Ethic can be summed up in his own words:

'Land is a system of independent parts, which should be regarded as a community not a commodity.'

[2] (Leopold 1948]

Why prefer to view the land as community rather than as a commodity? First of all we must define what the word 'community' meant for Leopold when he used the word to refer to the land.

An Outline of the ideas of Community in the Land Ethic.

The Land Ethic calls for the land to be viewed as a balanced pyramidical relationship of predator and prey which comprises an interaction of biological organisms that form a super-organism, which exists in a symbiotic holistic relationship. It calls for an 'earth-centred' activity and thinking - whereby we should put an end to our unrestricted encroachment upon and development of wilderness areas with the consequent despoliation. We should conceive of humanity as being a member of the autopoietic biotic community. This membership places upon us certain obligations and responsibilities to do all that we can to ensure the healthy continuance of this inter-relational, symbiotic system. For Leopold the health of the land is summed up in his well-known maxim: 'A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community.'

His emotional, spiritualist relation to the land have caused me to speculate that his attitude might be pantheistic in nature and his writing style certainly reminds me of perhaps the greatest of all English nature writers, who strangely is not well known even it appears in much of academia. I refer of course to the great Richard Jefferies. [3]

Questions of Reasonableness and Unreasonableness.

Is There Such a Thing As Intrinsic Value At All?

R. M. Hare [1919-2002] advocated the 'prescriptivism'  [4]  where judgments about goodness and badness, are not descriptive statements but represent a kind of command or prescription as to how we are to act. Notions regarding the intrinsic value of organisations such as ecosystems accept the intrinsic worth of life forms in general and therefore extends to human embryos and people in a coma.. If one believes in the intrinsic value of entities that are part of a holism [such as the body of a pregnant woman] is necessarily an anti-abortionist and anti-euthanasia in nature.

The "noncognitivist "Axel Hägerström [1868-1939],  [5] said that ascriptions of value are neither true nor false. Hägerström's nocognitivism is called 'emotivism.' Like David Hume he claimed that ascriptions of value are in essence expressions of emotion. An emotivist believes that to say: 'That tree is good' is not to make a statement about the tree, but to say something like: 'Hooray for that tree!' A. J. Ayer [6] [1910-1989] and Charles L. Stevenson [1908-1979]  [7] believed something similar.

Hägerström characterized his own view as a type of "value-nihilism," and many have followed suit in taking noncognitivism of all kinds to constitute a rejection of the very idea of intrinsic value. Most Cognitivists claim that our attributions of worth or value to objects constitute statements that are either true or false. For Leopopld conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. Only those who know the most about it can appreciate how little we know about it. The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant: "What good is it?" Leopold suggests the there should be an ethical relationship to the land and that this relationship should and must be based on love, respect, and admiration for the land.

Furthermore this ethical relationship should be not just because of economic value but also based on value in the philosophical sense. The land ethic makes sense because of the close relationship and interdependence of humans with land that provides food and amenity and contributes to air and water quality. Humans have tended to become disconnected from the land because of technological developments that give apparent but not actual independence from the land. Substitutes for natural material, for example polyester instead of cotton, furthers the notion that land is not essential for survival and that technology can provide suitable substitutes. Farm mechanization has also tended to separate the farmer from the land, the result being less care and attention for a critical resource.

What about the intentionally organized realm of human activity?

As Warwick Fox points out

That is simply what they do; they are physical systems-special kinds of physical systems, to be sure, but physical systems nonetheless-and nothing more. It is a mistake to attribute intentionality to entities that do not have affective capacities that do not have some at least rudimentary form of inner experience. But why shouldn't environmental ethics place its primary focus of concern on entities that are essentially products of the self-organizing realm (previously termed the "natural" realm)*! Isn't that what environmental concern should be about?

And the answer to that, in four words, is: No, not only that. The restriction of this primary focus of concern to the self-organizing realm (i. e., to animals, plants, and ecosystems) is both arbitrary and extremely limiting in terms of its wider applicability (e. g., to the built environment). For example, although ecologically oriented enthusiasts can sometimes make it sound as if the ecological world is so delicately interwoven that the removal of a single strand (e. g., a single species) is enough to cause the entire fabric (e. g., an entire ecosystem) to fall apart, this is, of course, typically (although not always) far from the truth. It is often possible to remove a species-or introduce a new species for that matter-without particularly compromising the autopoietic functioning of an ecosystem at all. In these cases it is not at all clear that the holistic integrity approach offers any firm basis on which to object to the extinction of a species or the addition of a new species, since the holistic integrity (or autopoietic functioning) of the ecosystem is not in question.

J. Baird Callicott has promoted a communitarian environmental system inspired by the "land ethic" writings of Aldo Leopold. One subject of concern is a dilemma. Either: the position is open to a charge of "eco- fascism" because it holds that only one maximal community fundamentally matters and interests of smaller communities and individuals can be swamped by a fundamental concern with the whole.

There are those who strenuously reject the ideas which Leopold promoted. The science fiction writer Robert Heinlein wrote the following:

Conclusion.

In my opinion it is an error to impute existential motivation to insentient beings on the basis of having a teleology. Ends or purposes do not exist for them. I believe that it will not be long before for most people the notions of anthropocentricism and biocentrism coincide and that it's vital to retain whatever ecological integrity we can between now and then.

Having said that I disagree with the philosophical route by which Leopold was motivated to promulgate his Land Ethic I thoroughly agree with this green outlook - so any strictures that I have are in a way valueless. There is no doubt and it would be foolish to argue differently, that the spiritualistic approach which includes notions of intrinsicality is very popular with huge sections of the public and that we owe Leopold a huge debt for the part he has played in the popularisation of ideas of responsibility and good husbandry and care and even love for the land which was so dear to him.

We need to curtail industrial logging, stop industrial over-fishing,  stop global warming, and control industrial agriculture. We have developed in such a way that we characterise 'civilisation' as a way of life characterised by the expansion of cities. A city is a collection of people living in numbers large enough to require the importation of resources. As cities expand we have to denude larger areas of the land to cater for that expansion. At first it bothered me intellectually that Leopold dealt in so much abstraction - that like most transcendentalists he talked in terms of sentient and insentient entities as having 'inherent value.'

As an anti-hunting  supporter and life-long vegetatarin (the thought of eating parts of dead cadavers appals me) His pre-occupation with shooting and thereby killing animals is difficult to swallow.  But he was a renowned scientist and scholar, a sincere and exceptional teacher, philosopher, and gifted writer who did much to initiate the environmental movement and promote a widespread interest in ecology as a science. His plusses by far compensate for his  love of killing animals and ontological minuses. If his form of  intrinsic approach engages, awakens and helps persuade the masses to change - then the evironmental ends justify the lack of philosophical  clarity and  ontological misunderstandings - certainly as far as I am concerned.

It is for his book, A Sand County Almanac, that Leopold is best known to millions of people around the globe. The Almanac, is often acclaimed as the century's literary landmark in conservation, On the basis of my critical analysis of Leopold's work, which as an eliminative determinist  I have 'read with charity.' My paper brings forward  what I believe to be both Leopold's reasons for extending the idea of a community to the land and the fact that his efforts were justified and  reasonable and that his Land Ethic was a landmark development of our ethical thinking.

References:

[1] Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There, 1948, Oxford University Press, New York, 1987, pg. 204

[9] Heinlein, Robert -Time Enough For Love. (Putnam 1973) )