Land Ethic

Historical development

Leopold (1887–1948) trained as a forester in Gifford Pinchot’s Forest Service, under its utilitarian conservationism. He pioneered the field of game management and fought for the designation of wilderness within the national forests.

His views changed with experience. His well-known account of shooting a wolf and watching “a fierce green fire dying in her eyes” records his turn away from killing predators toward an ecological understanding of the land. In 1935 he bought a worn-out farm in Wisconsin and began restoring it, and that farm is the setting of the Almanac. The land ethic was published after his death. It became central to environmental ethics in the 1970s, when J. Baird Callicott defended and developed it philosophically.

Principal claims

• The land is a community that people belong to. It is not a commodity they own.
• Ethics must extend to this community. The land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror to plain member and citizen.
• Right action keeps the biotic community whole, stable and beautiful.
• Economic self-interest alone cannot carry conservation, because most members of the land community have no economic value. Conservation needs an ethic that individuals hold, landowners above all.
• The ethic depends on ecological literacy, on understanding the land as a circuit of energy running through soils, plants and animals.

Policy implications

The land ethic supports protecting wilderness, but its distinctive contribution concerns working land. Farms, woodlots and ranches should be managed with ecological understanding by owners who have taken on duties the law cannot enforce. The ethic supports active restoration and management, hunting included as a tool, and it treats predators as members of the community to be kept, not removed. Leopold doubted that government ownership and regulation could replace private conscience.

Internal disagreements

Readers disagree about whether the land ethic is holist, as in Callicott’s reading, where value lies in the community as a whole, or pluralistic, an addition to duties toward people and animals that leaves those duties in place. “Stability” has been reread in the light of ecology that no longer assumes nature tends toward balance. Leopold’s heirs dispute whether the ethic needs private landowners or can be carried out through public programmes.

Criticisms and controversies

Tom Regan aimed his charge of “environmental fascism” at the holist reading. Ecologists have questioned whether “integrity” and “stability” work as scientific concepts. Some critics see the land ethic as a rural North American landowner’s philosophy, with little to say about cities, industry or global injustice.

Callicott and others answer that the ethic adds to existing duties without replacing them, and that its concepts can be updated without losing their point.

Relationships to other traditions

The land ethic is the source of ecocentrism and ecological holism and the philosophical ancestor of restoration ecology. It bridges Pinchot’s conservationism and John Muir’s preservationism. Its concern for working land links it to agrarian conservatism and Wendell Berry, and its defence of wilderness links it to wilderness preservation.