Revisioning Health: Leopold’s Land Ethic
and the Larger Self
by
Brett R. Joseph
September 2011
That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be
loved and respected is an extension of ethics. That land yields a cultural
harvest is a fact long known, but latterly often forgotten.
- A. Leopold, 1966, A Sand County Almanac, p. xix
Environmental ethicist Aldo Leopold identified a single premise as the basis
for all ethics: “that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent
parts.” (p. 239). This “community concept” lies at the heart of Leopold’s land ethic
and “reflects the existence of an ecological conscience;” an evolved understanding of
interdependence that “enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils,
waters, plants, and animals.” (p. 239) Being aware of our participation in the larger
community of life, individuals with a developed ecological conscience assume
responsibility for the “health of the land” which Leopold defines as “the capacity of
the land for self-renewal.” (p. 258). According to this understanding, that which is
right from an ethical standpoint encompasses our individual responsibility to preserve
the land’s generative capacity, its health as a living system of interdependency.
In Leopold words “[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”
(p.262). This statement is elegant in its simplicity, but discloses a profound insight
aligned with the wisdom traditions of native America and other traditional cultures.
This wisdom stands in stark contrast the culture of radical individualism, materialism
and colonial expansionism that has dominated the modern-industrial era in America
and throughout the Western world.
Of course, the contemporary literature in environmentalism and critical studies
is replete with challenges to this industrial-era mind-set. So what distinguishes
Leopold’s writing as a unique contribution, capable of informing solutions to today’s
multiple and complex challenges to human and ecological health? It is, quite simply,
this: By framing an expansive concept of community health with ethical responsibility
grounded in the land and placed at the feet of each individual, Leopold reconciled the
concepts of individualism and inter-dependency. His vision constructed a bridge
across a cultural divide that, even today in America, persists as a deep wound in the
collective psyche that is reflected in the popular discourse; an unhealthy schism
between advocates on either side of a false choice between self-determination and
social-ecological responsibility.
Leopold himself maintained that a land ethic could not survive and flourish on
the basis of legislative prescriptions alone. Rather it must be acquired and transmitted
as a matter of individual responsibility and thus as a matter of culture; learned through
nature-based experiences that put us in touch with wildness and with the inherent
regenerative capacities of natural ecosystems. A healthy culture, in the context of the
post-industrial West, merges traditional-humanistic values with ecological
consciousness, and is reflected in natural, social and human-built environments alike;
environments that nourish the heart and soul by aligning our daily habits with the lifesustaining patterns and processes of nature. This sentiment is reflected in the writing
of educational reformer David Orr (2004) who describes as “the only realistic course
imaginable” a future where our concepts of individual and collective sanity are
grounded in a new covenant with place and with the natural world; where education
“supports and nourishes a reverence for life” giving rise to ecological consciousness
and contributing to “biophilia revolution.” (p. 145-148).
[I] think we can safely surmise that biophilia [a term coined by Eric Fromm],
like the capacity to love, needs the help and active participation of parents,
grandparents, teachers and other caring adults. … For children the sense of
biophilia needs instruction, example, and validation by a caring adult. And for
adults, rekindling the sense of wonder may require a child’s excitement and
openness to natural wonders as well (Orr, 2004, 143).
Leading change in support of personal and culture health requires the
enactment of integrative, cross-disciplinary practices in the fields of medicine,
education, agriculture, art, architecture, psychology, finance, organizational
development and other fields, all of which can beneficially reflect principles of
ecological design that allow us to co-create with natural systems in mutually
reinforcing processes of health and wholeness.
One pioneering application of the ecological design in support of education
and integrative health consists of the development of a school-based edible forest
garden, such as the one being implemented at The Intergenerational School in
Cleveland, Ohio. A school-based edible forest garden is a place for learning how to
participate in a co-creative relationship with nature, transforming our understanding of
that relationship from one of alienation (self-and-other) to a relationship of
participation within a living natural system (the larger Self) with which we are fully
identified, as suggested by the phrase "we are nature working" (Jacke, 2010, personal
comm.). “The forest gardening vision brings humans and nature into a mutually
enhancing embrace as co-creative participants in our shared health and evolution
(Jacke, 2005, p. 1). The edible forest garden is simultaneously an expression of
human design and an expression of nature's capacity for self-healing and selfregeneration. It is, in essence, an enactment of Leopold’s land ethic which moves
beyond conservation to foster regeneration of healthy ecosystems and healthy human
communities. It produces healthy, locally grown food, provides daily opportunities
for human-nature interaction, appeals to the senses, affords opportunities for learning
basic agrarian skills and high-level integrative thinking across disciplinary boundaries,
involves the whole body in movement with the cycles of nature, and in many other
ways supports healing and healthy lifestyle development for intergenerational
learners.
By engaging in experiential learning within the container of a well-designed
edible forest garden, intergenerational learners gain a holistic understanding of personal
wellness; a sense of thriving together within a dynamic ecosystem that well expresses
nature as an extension of our personal embodiment. With this understanding, learners
gain an ethical perspective that considers personal health as being inseparable from
ecosystem health, i.e., the implicit values carried in the integrity and generative capacity
of the human mind-body system are ultimately inseparable from those same values as
embodied within well functioning ecosystems. In systems thinking, the concept of
"embeddedness" is particularly relevant to this understanding of a healthy human-nature
relationship (Walton, 2004, 272). Each of us is a system embedded within a larger
system; a self embedded within a larger Self.
References
Jacke, D. (2005). Ecological design and practice for temperate climate permaculture, 2
vols., White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green.
Leopold, A. (1966). A Sand County Almanac. New York: Ballantine Books.
Orr, D. W. (2004). Earth in mind: On education, environment, and the human prospect.
Washington, D.C.: Island Press.
Walton, D. C. (2004). Modeling Organizational Systems: Banathy’s Three Lenses
Revisited. Systemic Practice and Action Research, 17 (4), 265-284.