Rethinking the Land Ethic: Sustainability and the Humanities: Wk1: Julianne L. Warren: Syllabus
draft (4/30)
Public talk theme: “The Music beyond Dissent”-- In what ways might humanity, and members of Western
civilization in particular, better imagine ourselves taking responsibility for and moving beyond lifestyles
that harm Earth’s capacity to renew itself? Going further, how might we move beyond merely doing no
harm to kinds of thinking and acting that are mutually beneficial for all of Earth’s life, including our own?
Week One: History and Development of Sustainability
--What has sustainability in Western culture meant over time?
--How do those meanings seem to align or not with nature’s realities?
--What does history help us to understand about sustainability for the future?
Day 1: Envisioning Sustainability Before “Sustainability”
Western culture’s literary legacy is rich with complex stories—mental geographies--that embody the basic
idea of sustainability, defined broadly as human-nature relationships that support a durable civilization.
Spanning a mere few thousand years, we’ll discuss some related ideals emerging from experiences with
real landscapes found in Plato and Ovid, for example. We’ll try to lay a bit of the groundwork of evidence
for a multiplicity of ideas about humans in relation to nature in the West’s ancient heritage.
Not leaving the ancients behind, we’ll leap to the 17 th century to use the thought experiment of Francis
Bacon’s New Atlantis to consider his ideas regarding how people were to use nature to have their needs
met; who had what access to nature politically, socially, and economically; and how people were to value
nature in ways contributing to meaningful lives. We will also consider some of the historical-ecological
context out of which Bacon’s vision emerged. Enlightenment ideas have arguably since held a cultural
stronghold and are relevant to more recent conversations about humans and nature.
For the past 300 years, the human population has continued expanding exponentially as has the
power of humanity’s tools through the industrializing 19 th century and into the present. We’ll discuss the
hopeful fable of sustained yield management voiced by U.S. Chief Forester Gifford Pinchot at the start of
the 20th century in relation to Bacon’s earlier ideas.
We will also emphasize the story of American conservationist Aldo Leopold (1887-1948), who
began his career as a forester under Pinchot’s administration. Leopold’s journey was a concerned response
to the rapid expansion of human empire and its consequences for nature and civilization. We’ll look at
Leopold’s early, unfolding thinking about what were potentially durable ways of living. We’ll also discuss
Part I of Leopold’s posthumously published A Sand County Almanac (1949) aimed at helping people
reconsider culturally dominant perceptions about nature and expand them.
Bacon, Francis. 2008. New Atlantis (1627) in Francis Bacon: The Major Works. Vickers, B. (ed.). London:
Oxford World’s Classics, pp. 457-489.
Merchant, C. 2008. “The Violence of Impediments.” Isis 99: 731-760.
Pinchot, Gifford. 1908. “An American Fable.” National Geographic 19(5): 345-350:
http://books.google.com/books?id=utgKAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA345&lpg=PA345&dq=gifford+pinchot+an+
american+fable&source=bl&ots=UsLtn60FuR&sig=2uwDRgpDkys5pq8rxeNuVvWT3Ww&hl=en&ei=lT
kfTbfgIIr6sAPhwcmmAg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBcQ6AEwAA#v=onepa
ge&q=gifford%20pinchot%20an%20american%20fable&f=false
Newton, Julianne. Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey. Washington, D.C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2006:
Chapter 1, pp 17-44.
Leopold, A. A Sand County Almanac; with essays on conservation from Round River. New York:
Ballantine Books, 1990, Part I.
Day 2: Seeing Present Reality in Relation to Sustainability
Influenced by Leopold’s work, in 1978, the plant scientist Wes Jackson applied the term “sustainable
agriculture” to his idea for remaking humanity’s 10,000 year history of till-farming. He was aiming to
transform the ways people used lands into ones with more potential for permanence. Taking native prairies
as a model, he imagined a new form of farming he called “perennial polyculture.” Less than a decade later,
in 1987, G.H. Brundtland introduced the phrase “sustainable development” into the policy arena and
expressed what has become today’s most well-known definition of “sustainability.” In the 1970 Nobel
Lecture of the father of the “Green Revolution,” Norman Borlaug, mentioned his hope that governments
would spend more on agricultural education and research “designed to sustain life and humanize life.”
Looking back from the year 2000, he acknowledged by then a full-fledged debate “between [science-based]
agriculturists and environmentalists” over what “sustainable agriculture means,” with particular reference
to the Third World. Through the 1990s and into the present there has been exponential growth in the use of
the terms in adjectival and noun forms in various senses. At the same time there has been exponential
growth in human population and environmental crises—spreading to global proportions.
Recognizing that humanity’s welfare was inseparable from that of the rest of nature, Jackson, Brundtland,
and many others in the 20th century have been trying to piece together different visions of humans and
nature in more harmonious and just relationships. (For Borlaug, the matter involved balancing an equation
involving 3 factors—land, food, and population. Yet Green Revolutionaries have put their efforts into
maximizing only one part--food.) Yet few today have come as far as Leopold did in recognizing and
conceptualizing the interdependencies of soils, waters, plants, and animals, including humans and the
importance of their ways of perceiving and valuing nature in shaping landscapes. Leopold’s
understandings, though popular for a conservationist, were on the margins of his own time, and remain
largely so today.
We will continue following Leopold on his journey moving from his professional start as member of the
young U.S. Forest Service under Gifford Pinchot to his founding of the new profession of game
management and ultimately to his frustrations with its failures. We will explore how he came to see that
what was needed for a durable and prosperous civilization was a matter of perception and values, raising
the question: If the natural world is like this, then how ought we to interact with it? We will consider, in
particular, the second part of Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, which was his effort to help people
understand how people’s thinking about and ways of using land were out of step with ecological and
evolutionary realities. Paying particular attention to his essay “Odyssey,” we’ll take a look of what Leopold
identified as a cleavage of worldviews when it comes to defining what makes for a durable civilization in
relation to nature.
And we will discuss how human interactions with soils, waters, plants, and animals are also interconnected
with Earth’s atmosphere leading to today’s soil erosion, mass extinction, and climate change crisis.
Revisiting the experimental space created in Bacon’s New Atlantis we will begin considering how past and
present ideas about sustainability in relation to present knowledge about ecological realities—how people
should get their basic needs met, who should make decisions affecting communities, and how people
should value nature meaningfully—may or may not promote the durability of a civilization.
Newton, J. and E.T. Freyfogle. 2005. “Sustainability: A Dissent.” Conservation Biology19 (1): 23-31.
Newton, Julianne. 2006. Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey. Washington, D.C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2006:
Chapters 2 and 6.
Leopold, A. A Sand County Almanac; with essays on conservation from Round River. New York:
Ballantine Books, 1990, Part II.
McKibben, B. 2010. Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet. New York: Times Books, Chapter 1 “A
New World,” pages 1-46.
Day 3: Dreaming Up Fresh Ideas for Durable Civilizations
As David Orr put it, “the reality is that we start mostly from ruins.” Given where we stand today in
terms of Earth’s conditions, we will move to consider what kinds of ideas may help Western civilization
prevent ongoing harm and better promote the mutual well-being of all of Earth’s life, including thriving
human civilizations.
Continuing to draw from Leopold’s journey—particularly his famous essay “The Land Ethic”—we’ll
discuss Leopold’s vision of humans and nature living in harmony and what it might take to approach it.
We’ll also discuss the Earth Charter’s view of “sustainable development.” Taking Leopold’s essay “Round
River” and Terry Tempest Williams’s piece “Ground-Truthing”--about a literal “old-new” fragile world--as
“open spaces” for further imagination, we’ll attempt to begin doing what Dana Meadows urges in her 1994
speech. We’ll begin considering fresh visions for a sustainable world in concert with what we know about
chemical, evolutionary, and ecological realities and full of human creativity still linked with, in Barry
Lopez’s terms, the “narrative spine” of our species’ 30,000-40,000 year old (at least) unique capacity to
dream. We’ll ask what may need to be renovated in New Atlantis’s old dreams in order to promote durable,
prosperous civilizations in the future.
Leopold, A. A Sand County Almanac; with essays on conservation from Round River. New York:
Ballantine Books, 1990, Part III and “The Round River.”
Newton, Julianne. Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey. Washington, D.C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 2006:
Chapter 11.
The Earth Charter. http://www.earthcharterinaction.org/content/pages/Read-the-Charter.html
“Ground-truthing” in Williams, T.T. 2009. The Open Space of Democracy. Eugene, Oregon: Wipf and
Stock, pp. 28-62.
Meadows, D. “Envisioning a Sustainable World,” Speech written for the Third Biennial meeting of the
International Society for Ecological Economics, 1994 (8 pages):
http://www.sustainer.org/pubs/Envisioning.DMeadows.pdf