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The wealthy mine operator has a good reason to pretend he doesn't get Leopold.
This is the root of the problem with Leopold's idea: it requires people to think too much against their natural tendencies. It is the natural tendency of essentially every other creature on Earth to find a niche and stay put, being constrained from unlimited growth by predators and the availability of food and water. This is not the case for human beings. Humans, gifted with brains capable of fine ideas such as Leopold's, nevertheless have a quite different propensity from other creatures; our unspoken policy is one of continuous expansion. Whether through nature or nurture, our inclination is toward exploration, exploitation, and accumulation.
This is what Leopold is up against. To be practical, his land ethic would require a change of heart in every human being in the world, and it would have to be a permanent change as well, essentially "hard wired" into every generation which followed. Education would not be enough; education has not been enough to solve the problems of violent crime and poverty, it would not be enough to solve the environmental problem.
Considering when he wrote the article, it really is quite amazing to see his ideas so well developed (for the problem with his ethic is not a lack of development). His ethic presages many of the things said by people like...
The change in the Vietnam-era zeitgeist in the United States was surely at least partly attributable to the influence of Leopold's land ethic article.
But the zeitgeist has shifted away from such ideals; we are more environmentally conscious than at any period in history, yet much more entranced with conspicuous consumption as well.
At least within our lifetimes the world must go on the way it has been. It will almost certainly never become a sparsely populated Eden with humans clustered about in communes every dozen miles or so. Perhaps the meek (the Amish for instance) may inherit the earth after the great have exhausted themselves destroying it, and perhaps this is how things are going to be in a thousand years or so, but if it happens it will happen accidentally. Such a condition is not something we can strive toward and ever hope to attain as long as human beings are the complicated creatures that they are.
This does not mean that we must relegate Leopold's ethic to a bell jar in some museum for succeeding generations to marvel and wonder at; rather it is something we can appreciate for the ideal it represents. His ethic is utopian and unrealistic, but utopias are nice to think about, even if ultimately unobtainable.
Aldo Leopold and Environmental History In answering the question of whether the United States has improved on environmental policy since the 1930s, the cyclical nature of the political system must be considered. A generational reform cycle occurs every 30-40 years, such as the Progressive Era of 1900-20, the New Deal of the 1930s and the New Frontier and Great Society of the 1960s and early-1970s. All of the progress that the
Leopold further asserted that human beings were not superior to others in their ecological system since every one has an important role to play especially the land. The idea that "The Whole informs the part" was also critical to understanding Leopold's land ethic. The author maintains that man needs to understand and appreciate the other members of the universe in order to determine his place in it. The one
Leopold In "American Earth," Leopold Aldo refers to the "epidemic of ditch digging and land booming" that represents the "conqueror role" that humanity has played for most of its existence (269). The conqueror role presumes that the human species is entitled to use the earth in any way possible to achieve human ends. It is a mentality that leads to wanton destruction and misuse of land. Natural resources are depleted. Aldo
In Don DeLilo's White Noise, the relationship between humanity and the environment in discussed in light of the television news coverage of catastrophes, and this discussion demonstrates the kind of hyper-conservation emergent as a result of the modern media environment. In particular, White Noise enacts a prediction made by Aldo Leopold in his essay "The Land Ethic," by showing how the dominance of the television has created a divide between
" (Carson, 2) That the correlation between these collected symptoms and the use of pesticides in our predominantly agricultural towns had yet to be recognized at this point in history is important to consider. Though today it still receives troublingly little acknowledgment, the exponential rise in the consumption of organic produce in recent years is indicative of a graduating cognizance of that which Carson's work brought to the forefront of
The silo argument is similar to the laboratory argument, but it focuses on the tangible things nature has to offer -- not just the knowledge of medicine that certain plants can provide, but the plants themselves that are used to make the medicine. This argument acknowledges that though nature can provide many material resources, these resources are limited, and if they are harvested and/or utilized in such a way that