Land Ethic Aldo Leopold's Land

Land Ethic Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic Leopold gives us Ulysses returning from the war and putting to death a number of his slave girls. This was not considered right or wrong, but perfectly natural for they were merely property; which entails privileges but no obligations. In Ulysses' time, he had rights, and his wife had rights, but not the mere slave girls. Leopold states that nowadays, slave girls have rights; that is, all people have rights.

The extension of this ethical principal from wives to slave girls is part of the natural trend toward a more ethical form of civilization. It follows (according to Leopold) that these same kinds of ethical principals (rights) would one day be extended to the land itself. This is my first problem with Leopold. It's important to remember that we allow that human beings have rights simply because it is so darned easy to anthropomorphize them.

It is not impossible to anthropomorphize the land, it has been done, but doing so is more problematic when trying to convince people to behave in some way differently from how they are used to behaving. We can experience the pain and suffering of a dying slave girl, if only vicariously, because we share the same mental, emotional, and physical "equipment" as the slave girl, but this is not true of the land. We can appreciate the beauty of unspoiled land, and even the shame of needlessly spoiling it.

But when a bulldozer starts tearing up the sod, maybe some people will experience an emotional response, but it will be nothing compared to the reaction of seeing the slave girl dangling from a rope by her neck. I am unconvinced that the parallel he draws between Ulysses' slave girls and his land is a reasonable one. Husbands, wives and slave girls have some things in common; not so these groups and the land. Further, he is almost offering us a syllogism: Proposition A is that wives deserve humane treatment.

Proposition B. that slave girls (a lower order of life than wives) deserve human treatment. Then he wallops us with his conclusion: Since the land is a lower order of life than wives or slave girls, it also deserves human treatment. As syllogisms go, this is not a very good one. Perhaps the land does deserve humane treatment, but if so I am unconvinced that it does so for the reasons Leopold offers.

It seems rather like he has started with a conclusion that it is a good idea to treat the land with respect, and gone off in search of a novel premise. As a purely academic exercise, if someone who never believed that the land deserved ethical treatment before suddenly believed that it did as a response to reading Leopold's article, then I would say more power to them.

However, the kinds of subtle arguments Leopold gives us are going to get lost (more or less) on more rustic characters or those with a vested interest in exploiting the land. 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 Jacques Cousteau and Buckminster Fuller a generation later; doubtless it influenced the ideas of those geniuses, as well as others. The change in the Vietnam-era zeitgeist in the United States was surely at least partly attributable to the influence.