The Land Ethic Notes
Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. Oxford University Press, 1949.
The Land Ethic
Odysseus's hanging of slave-girls highlights a time when ethics didn't extend to human chattels, who were considered property to be disposed of expediently. Over the last three thousand years, ethical considerations have broadened, reducing the scope of actions guided solely by expediency.
The Ethical Sequence
The extension of ethics is a process of ecological evolution, limiting freedom of action in the struggle for existence. Ecologically, an ethic restricts actions, while philosophically, it differentiates social from anti-social behavior. This differentiation stems from the cooperation among interdependent individuals or groups, termed symbioses by ecologists. Politics and economics are advanced forms of symbioses where competition is partly replaced by ethical cooperation.
The complexity of cooperative mechanisms has grown with population density and tool efficiency. Early ethics focused on individual relations, exemplified by the Mosaic Decalogue, whereas later additions addressed the relationship between individuals and society, like the Golden Rule and democracy. Currently, there's a lack of ethics concerning man's relationship with the land, treating it as mere property. Extending ethics to include the environment is both an evolutionary possibility and an ecological necessity, with conservation movements representing the start of this affirmation.
An ethic guides responses to new or complex ecological situations where social expediency isn't clear. Ethics can be seen as a developing community instinct. All ethics rely on the premise that individuals are part of an interdependent community, balancing competition with cooperation.
The land ethic broadens community boundaries to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, changing humanity's role from conqueror to a plain member and citizen, respecting both fellow members and the community as a whole. The conqueror role is self-defeating because it assumes complete knowledge of the community's workings, which is never the case.
The Community Concept
In the biotic community, parallels exist, such as historical events shaped by biotic interactions between people and land, where the land's characteristics influenced outcomes as much as the people did. For example, the transformation of Kentucky's cane-lands into bluegrass due to pioneer activities significantly impacted historical events like the Louisiana Purchase and the Civil War. Similarly, in the Southwest, the absence of a resilient plant like bluegrass led to land degradation and erosion, affecting the animal community and overall landscape.
The Pueblo Indians in the Southwest managed to settle the land sustainably because they weren't equipped with range livestock. In India, some regions avoided land degradation by carrying grass to cows instead of the other way around. Plant succession plays a crucial role in steering the course of history, with pioneers simply revealing the inherent successions in the land.
The Ecological Conscience
Conservation represents a harmonious state between people and land, yet progress is slow despite significant efforts. Conservation education's content, focusing on obeying laws, voting correctly, joining organizations, and practicing profitable conservation, is insufficient. It lacks emphasis on obligations and sacrifices, urging only self-interest. For example, in southwestern Wisconsin, farmers initially adopted soil remediation practices when subsidized but abandoned them once the subsidies ended, indicating that lasting change requires more than economic incentives.
Wisconsin's Soil Conservation District Law, which offered free technical service and machinery for self-written land-use rules, saw limited success as counties didn't write any rules. Farmers chose profitable practices, neglecting those beneficial to the broader community. This highlights the absence of a land-use ethic beyond economic self-interest. While obligations are recognized in community projects like roads and schools, they're absent in land and water management, showing that land-use ethics are still driven by economics.
The challenge is extending social conscience to the land, which requires internalizing ethical obligations. Progress requires changes in intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions that philosophy and religion haven't yet addressed. In making conservation easy, its significance has been diminished, necessitating a deeper ethical framework.
Substitutes for a Land Ethic
A conservation system based solely on economic motives is fundamentally flawed because most members of the land community lack economic value. When these non-economic entities are threatened, justifications based on economic importance are invented. However, species should persist as a matter of biotic right.
A similar issue arises with predators, which were previously defended based on their economic benefits. It is now argued that predators are members of the community with a right to exist, independent of economic interests. Economics-minded foresters have dismissed certain tree species due to slow growth or low sale value, while in ecologically advanced forestry, non-commercial species are preserved for their ecological role, like beech trees improving soil fertility.
Entire biotic communities like marshes and bogs are often considered economically worthless and relegated to government-managed refuges. However, private landowners should also take pride in preserving these essential areas. The over-reliance on government for conservation raises concerns about the ultimate scale and sustainability of these efforts. Industrial landowners often resist government intervention but don't voluntarily practice conservation on their lands. Subsidies should not be the sole motivator for conservation; ethical obligations toward land should be taught in educational institutions.
In summary, conservation driven by economic self-interest overlooks vital, non-commercial elements of the land community and excessively relies on government intervention. An ethical obligation from private owners is essential.
The Land Pyramid
An ethic supplementing the economic view of land necessitates a mental image of land as a biotic mechanism, best represented by the biotic pyramid, with plants absorbing solar energy and passing it through various layers: soil, plants, insects, birds/rodents, and carnivores. Each layer depends on the layers below for sustenance and offers services to those above, decreasing in numerical abundance towards the apex.
Food chains connect these layers, each species being a link in multiple chains within the complex pyramid. Evolution has increased the height and complexity of this pyramid over time, adding layers and links. Land is not just soil but a conduit of energy via food chains, with death and decay returning energy to the soil. The flow of energy is sustained, augmented by air absorption and storage in soils and forests. The rate and nature of this energy flow are dependent on the plant and animal community's structure and the intricate cellular organization.
Changes in one part of the energy circuit affect others. While evolutionary changes are slow and localized, human tools cause faster and more violent changes. Predatory species are removed or diminished from the top of the pyramid, and wild species are replaced by domesticated ones, often with unintended consequences for the ecosystem structure.. Agriculture can disrupt the flow of energy through the soil, leading to erosion, while industry can pollute water, disrupting the energy circuit. Transportation pools energy circuits globally, releasing stored energy and potentially obscuring the consequences of violence.
This view of land as an energy circuit shows:
Land is more than just soil.
Native plants and animals maintain the energy circuit, while others may not.
Human-induced changes differ significantly from evolutionary changes and produce far reaching impacts.
The key questions are the land's ability to adapt to new conditions and whether changes can be implemented less violently. Some biotas, like those in Western Europe and Japan, are resilient to conversion, while others show disorganization. The less violent the changes, the better the probability of successful ecosystem adjustment. High population densities require more violent changes, making conservation more challenging. The relationship between humans and land is complex, with numerous unknown factors.
Land Health and the A-B Cleavage
A land ethic entails an ecological conscience and a sense of responsibility for the land's health, defined as its capacity for self-renewal. Within conservation, there are differing viewpoints, a plane of disagreement. Group A sees land as soil for commodity production, while Group B views it as a biota with a broader function. In forestry, Group A grows trees like crops, valuing cellulose, while Group B manages natural environments and worries about biodiversity, like chestnut species.
A parallel divide exists in wildlife management, where Group A prioritizes meat and sport, with production measured by game take, and Group B is worried about the ethics of game crops. In agriculture, scientific advances have improved techniques, but the food-value of farm crops is of concern to Group B. The central paradoxes involve humanity's relationship with the land: conqueror versus citizen, and master versus caretaker. It is the role of Homo sapiens, as a species, to leave the world not the same place it was.
The Outlook
An ethical relationship with land requires love, respect, admiration, and philosophical value. The modern educational and economic system distances people from the land. A lack of understanding of ecology is significant, a lack of insight even in education settings. The economic determinists have tied around our necks the idea that economics determines all land-use - this is simply not true.
Actions and attitudes are determined by the land-users tastes and predilections, rather than by his purse. As a land-user thinketh, so is he. A land ethic is a product of social evolution, evolving in the minds of a thinking community and advancing from the individual to the community, increasing its intellectual content where operating mechanisms involve social approbation for right actions and social disapproval for wrong actions. We need gentler and more objective criteria for successful use.