Aldo Leopold’s Reverence for Life

Reposted from Defenders Magazine.


J. Baird Callicott

Why has Aldo Leopold had so much influence on the environmental movement, and why has his slender book of essays, A Sand County Almanac, become, in the words of Wallace Stegner, “almost a holy book in conservation circles”?

Perhaps because Leopold was a scientist, poet and philosopher, three gifts rarely found in one individual. As a scientist, he spoke with experience and authority. His way with words enabled him to communicate memorably with nonscientists. And he could not help but consider the philosophical and ethical implications of ecology.

In Leopold’s integrative thinking, ecology was never just another arcane science. Nor was it simply a fund of information useful for more efficient exploitation of natural resources. To him, ecology offered a new way to perceive and order the natural world. Moreover, Leopold found his values changing as his ecological understanding deepened. Ecology, he realized, was also pregnant with revolutionary ethical precepts, and these he deftly brought to light in the Almanac. Of all his contributions to modern conservation, the fathering of environmental ethics was perhaps his greatest.

The last of Sand County‘s three parts is entitled “The Upshot,” and the last piece in that part is “The Land Ethic.” There Leopold sketched out in broad strokes the moral implications of ecology. He called for a wholesale change in the “current philosophy of values,” which continues to this day to be based largely on utilitarianism, as articulated by 18th century philosopher Jeremy Bentham. According to Bentham, human happiness is the greatest good and all other living things are mere means to that end. Human beings have “intrinsic value” (we are valuable in and of ourselves) and everything else has “instrumental value” (or value because of its utility or use).

Now, science has revealed that the species Leopold called “our fellow voyagers in the odyssey of evolution” are useful not only as resources that we consume, but as suppliers of all sorts of ecosystem services. Insects pollinate our crops, fungi recycle plant and animal wastes, soil bacteria take nitrogen out of the air and make it available to plants. Untold species, both large and small, may provide future sources of foods or medicines. If we fully understood the usefulness of nature, then as good utilitarians we should be able to preserve it without disturbing our venerable beliefs about our uniqueness and superiority as human beings.

But because of our lack of knowledge and the extreme complexity of ecosystems, ecological self-interest is not enough to save them. It fails to address Leopold’s concern about conserving entire biotic communities. Without insect pollinators, the world we know would abruptly cease to exist. But the world has continued, thus far, to produce resources and provide natural services with only remnant populations of peregrine falcons, wolves and grizzly bears. A utilitarian might say that these charismatic animals should be preserved because they are valuable to us as aesthetic objects—rather like living, natural works of art. But again this falls short of a complete environmental ethic, because it loses sight of species that may not be considered beautiful but are just as vital to the biotic community.

Bentham said human beings have intrinsic value because we are sentient and can suffer. Animal-rights exponents have developed what could be called an environmental ethic by extending the classic utilitarian view. They argue that modern ethics should cover all other animals that are sentient and can suffer.

Certainly most of us believe that animals should not be treated cruelly or callously. But concern for wildlife populations and species preservation is not the same as concern for pain and suffering, particularly when one considers that the natural process of predation sometimes results in painful death. Moreover, a conservation ethic must involve the preservation of every species, sentient or not, including plants, fungi and microorganisms.

In his environmental ethic, Leopold set out from another point of departure. “The Land Ethic” unmistakably alludes to Charles Darwin’s account of the origin and evolution of ethics in The Descent of Man. Darwin’s explanation of how we came to have “moral sentiments” is particularly ingenious. The very existence of ethics poses an evolutionary mystery, since it would seem that the meanest and most aggressive of our ancestors would survive to pass those behavioral tendencies on to us. How could the meek have come to inherit the earth, not only in the gospel according to Matthew, but in the gospel according to religion’s reputed nemesis, Charles Darwin?

Here’s how. Our ancestors could survive and flourish only in a social setting. But without ethics, society is impossible. As Darwin put it, “No tribe could hold together if murder, robbery, treachery, etc., were common; consequently such crimes within the limits of the same tribe are branded with everlasting infamy.” Antisocial types were killed or exiled. They, not their giving and caring fellows, were the ones less fit for the intensely social environment in which humanity evolved.

Leopold retold Darwin’s story of the evolution of ethics and added a new ecological dimension. “All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . . Ecology simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land…. In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow members and also respect the community as such.”

Leopold had great respect for all members of the biotic community, but he took special interest in the large carnivores at the apex of the food chain. Only when they are present, he believed, could a biotic community retain the full measure of its integrity, beauty and stability. As members of various human communities—from our families to the global village—we have many moral obligations that are derived from the social relationships within our own species. But the biotic community to which we also belong is wildly different from all our human social spheres. It is this wildness, as represented by the large predators and his passion for wilderness, that Leopold celebrated. His land ethic has a holistic dimension. According to Leopold, “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.” This is the land ethic in a nutshell, Leopold’s new gospel addressed to us human beings who are now the most powerful—and thus must be the most responsible—members of the biotic community.

A Sand County Almanac at Amazon


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