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• Aldo Leopold, 1887-1948
• Grew up in Iowa, hiking and
hunting with his father, Carl,
along Miss. River marshes.
• Went to Yale, majoring in
forestry, then joined Forest
Service, working in the Carson
Nat’l Forest in NM in 1911.
• Albuquerque, Grand Canyon,
etc. Secretary of Albuquerque’s
Chamber of Commerce, writing,
surveying, game improvement
plans, soil conservation…
• From after WWI to 1924,
oversaw all federal forests in the
West.
• 1922, wrote argument to permanently preserve
750,000 acres of Gila River Valley…father of
National Forest Wilderness System
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The GILA NATIONAL FOREST is
one of the nation's largest
(approximately 3.3 million acres,
nearly one-fourth of which is set
aside as designated wilderness)
and most scenic year-round
recreation and natural areas. It
contains more federal land than
any other national forest outside
Alaska,
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• 1924, transferred to Madison.
• 1928, quit, worked writing,
consultant on conservation and
game
• Game Management, 1933, forged
a new interdisciplinary science
• Travels to Germany, Mexico
• Founds Wilderness Society
• 1935, buys worn out farm “The
Shack” near Baraboo, WI, the sand
counties
• 1948, dies of a heart attack while
fighting neighbor’s brush fire
• SCA published posthumously
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• Leopold family,
1939, “The Shack”
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Roaring Twenties
• Progressive regulations lapsed or ignored;
business left to itself
• President Harding presided over one of the
mostQuickTime™
corrupt administrations;
no concern for
and
a
conservation
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cars
• Travel increases
– Park Service shoots mountain lions so tourists
can see more elk in Yellowstone
• Agriculture increases 250% over 1914
levels…Great Dust Bowl
New Ecology
• Sir Arthur Tansley
1871-1955
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Trophic levels; pyramid structure; food chains
“The Varmint Question” 1915
“It is well-known that predatory animals are
continuing to eat the cream of the grower’s profits,
and it hardly needs to be argued that, with a game
supply as low as it is, a reduction in the predatory
animal population is bound to help the
situation…Whatever may have been the value of the
work accomplished by bounty systems, poisoning,
and trapping, individual or governmental, the fact
remains that varmints continue to thrive and their
reduction can be accomplished only by means of a
practical, vigorous, and comprehensive plan of
action.”
• But in later writing, even just
in 1925, he claims that this
“conservationist” picture is
wrong… ecology teaches us
that nature is interconnected
and even “alive”
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• Hence by SCA he regrets the
time when he was “young
and full of trigger-itch”
…instead we must “think like
a mountain”.
Sand County Almanac
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• Dubos: “the Holy Writ of
American conservationists”
• Foreman: “not only the most
important conservation book
ever written, it is the most
important book ever written”
• Stegner: one of the prophetic
books, the utterance of an
American Isaiah”
• Read by millions…comparable
to Walden and Silent Spring
• The mouse “who knows that grass
grows in order that mice may store it
as underground haystacks”…the
hawk, who “has no opinion why
grass grows, but he is well aware
that snow melts in order that hawks
may again catch mice” (4)
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• “Abraham knew exactly what the
land was for: it was to drip milk and
honey into Abraham’s mouth. At the
present moment, the assurance with
which we regard this assumption is
inverse to our degree of education”
(220)
“When the private landowner is asked to perform some
unprofitable act for the good of the community, he today
assents only with outstretched palm. If the act costs him
cash this is fair and proper, but when it costs only
forethought, open-mindedness or time, the issue is at
least debatable…[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.
An ethical obligation on the part of the private owner is
the only visible remedy for these situation.” (230)
• Life cycle of an oak
tree
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• How important the
tree diseases are for
the health of his
farm
We cannot discern these patterns in the individual, or in short
periods of time. The most intense scrutiny of an individual
rabbit tells us nothing of cycles. The cycle concept springs
from a scrutiny of the mass through decades.
This raises the disquieting question: do human populations
have behavior patterns of which we are unaware, but which
we help to execute? Are mobs and wars, unrests and
revolutions, cut of such cloth? …
It is reasonable to suppose that our social processes have a
higher volitional content than those of a rabbit, but it is also
reasonable to suppose that we, as a species, contain
population behavior patterns of which nothing is known
because circumstance has never evoked them. …
Ecology is now teaching us to search in animal populations
for analogies to our own problems. (186-187)
Themes
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• Preservation/
conservation
• Individual responsibility;
regulations can only do
so much
• Ecology and
interconnectedness of
parts of nature
• Our ignorance of the
ecological webs…
precautionary principle?
Land Ethic
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• “extension of ethics”…
“the land ethic simply
enlarges the boundaries
of the community to
include soils, waters,
plants, and animals, or
collectively, the land.”
• We need to admit “that
birds should continue as a
matter of biotic right”
“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.”
Similarities to Gaia Hypothesis
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Ethical Interlude
A subject is morally
considerable if and only
if…??
– Male property owner of
certain race
– Male or female of certain
race
– Male or female of any
race
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• Utilitarianism: says that one should
judge an action morally by its
consequences: one should
maximize the good. An action is
right if the consequences of its
contribution (for those morally
considerable) are no worse than its
alternative’s consequences.
• Rights-based views. Those who
are morally considerable are
bequeathed certain basic rights.
Libertarianism: “negative” rights.
Egalitarianism: negative and
opportunity rights.
Who is Morally Considerable?
Anthropocentric
Non-anthropocentric
People (adult rational
homo sapiens)?
People and upper
mammals?
Conscious beings
capable of suffering?
Living animals?
More?
• Who is morally considerable?
• Leopold: biotic community
individuals
Non-anthropocentricists
collectives
New battle line: E.g. “Can animal rights-advocates
be environmentalists?
Virtues
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• Killing a mosquito is not
so bad
• Saving a species in a
zoo without an existing
ecosystem not so good
• Learns lesson of
misinformed land
management
• Comprehensive system
with clear-ish decision
procedure based to
some extent on science
Criticism I
• Is/ought gap…ecological facts, by themselves,
don’t prove that “ecological integrity and
stability” are ethical values
– Response: Hume-Darwin-Leopold moral
sentimentalism?
• Why is the preservation of an energy circuit or
food chain a good in itself?
• What ecological model is he using, and why is
it normatively distinguished?
• Is the “integrity” of an ecosystem a welldefined term of ecology?
Criticism II
• Ethical holism is “totalitarian” (Kheel), or
“environmental fascism” (Regan). Subverts
rights of individuals to right of the
whole…followed to its logical extreme, it
condones genocide.
Leopold and Hunting
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• “there are four categories of
outdoors men: deer hunters,
duck hunters, bird hunters,
and non-hunters…The deer
hunter habitually watches the
next bend, the duck hunter
watches the skyline; the bird
hunter watches the dog; the
non-hunter does not watch”
“The Deer Swath”, 208.
Ecology
Does it really
suggest the picture
Leopold finds?
(Re)Interpreting the Land
Ethic
• Responses. Marietta:
good of biotic
community the only
good? A good? An
important good?
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• Norton: anthropocentric
re-interpretation of
Leopold
• Audience of the book
In 1935, there were only 25
nesting pairs of sandhill cranes in
Wisconsin.
"The ultimate value in these
marshes is wildness, and the crane
is wildness incarnate," he wrote.
"Some day, perhaps in the very
process of our benefactions,
perhaps in the fullness of geologic
time, the last crane will trumpet his
farewell and spiral skyward from
the great marsh. High out of the
clouds will fall the sound of hunting
horns, the baying of the phantom
pack, the tinkle of little bells, and
then a silence never to be broken,
unless perchance in some far
pasture of the Milky Way.”
Today there are 12,000 sandhill
cranes in Wisconsin.
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