Aldo Leopold
Aldo Leopold was an influential American conservationist, forester, and environmental philosopher. He is best known for his book "A Sand County Almanac," which has had a significant impact on the environmental movement. Leopold's concept of a "land ethic" emphasized the interconnectedness of humans and the natural world, advocating for responsible stewardship of the environment.
3 Key excerpts on "Aldo Leopold"
eBook - ePub- Joy A. Palmer Cooper, David E. Cooper, Joy A. Palmer Cooper, David E. Cooper(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...His conservation policy advice was sought on every scale, from the local and private to the public and national. Take environmental education: in addition to training graduate students for careers in wildlife management, Leopold offered an undergraduate Wildlife-Ecology course open to any University of Wisconsin student. He published a paper addressed to fellow academics in the field titled ‘The Role of Wildlife in a Liberal Education’, the most important advice of which was ‘to use wildlife ecology to teach the student how to put the sciences together’ – because ‘all the sciences and arts are [conventionally] taught as if they were separate’, but ‘they are separate only in the classroom’; all one need do is ‘step out on the campus and they are immediately fused’. 19 Take nature writing: A Sand County Almanac has become more than a classic in the field; it is a genre exemplar. Of all the environmental fields that Leopold either founded or that his genius shaped, none is of more lasting significance than environmental ethics. The climactic essay of the Almanac, ‘ The Land Ethic’, is the seminal text in this new field of philosophy. After all of his years working for a public conservation agency, the U.S. Forest Service, and helping to formulate policy and law for such newer agencies as the National Park Service and the Bureau of Biological Survey, Leopold came to believe that conservation would never succeed without a land ethic on the part of individual, private landowners. Government alone could not do the job. Leopold situated his proposed land ethic in the broader evolutionary-ecological worldview that he gradually exposed and inculcated in the preceding essays of the Almanac. From Charles Darwin he borrowed an account of ethics as a necessary condition for human social organization. ‘All ethics so far evolved’, Leopold wrote, rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts...
eBook - ePub- Joy A. Palmer, David E. Cooper, David Cooper, Joy A. Palmer, David E. Cooper, David Cooper(Authors)
- 2002(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...The climactic essay of the Almanac, ‘The Land Ethic’, is the seminal text in this new field of philosophy. After all of his years working for a public conservation agency, the US Forest Service, and helping to formulate policy and law for such newer agencies as the National Park Service and the Bureau of Biological Survey, Leopold came to believe that conservation would never succeed without a land ethic on the part of individual, private landowners. Government alone could not do the job. Leopold based his proposed land ethic on two scientific cornerstones: evolution and ecology. From Charles Darwin he borrowed an account of ethics as a necessary condition for human social organization. ‘All ethics so far evolved’, Leopold wrote, ‘rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. His instincts prompt him to compete for his place in that community, but his ethics prompt him also to co-operate (perhaps in order that there may be a place to compete for).’ 17 From Charles Elton, he borrowed the concept of a ‘biotic community’, a social model of the inter-relationships of plants and animals studied in ecology. Ecology, Leopold wrote, ‘simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils and waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land’. 18 Putting these two elements together, he formulated ‘a land ethic’, which ‘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 for the community as such.’ 19 The golden rule of the land of the land ethic is this: ‘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.’ 20 Leopold, of course, intended for the land ethic to supplement our human-to-human ethics, not replace them...
eBook - ePub- Ian A. Smith(Author)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...5 Callicott’s Account Leopold’s Story This chapter discusses J. Baird Callicott’s view of species’ intrinsic value and why we should preserve that value (1989, 1999). Callicott saw in David Hume, Charles Darwin, and Aldo Leopold a sociobiological account of why we humans intrinsically value others. This story is about how our other-regarding sentiments like sympathy evolved to care first about our kin, then to care for nonkin, and then to care for whole nations. Callicott saw that this story of intrinsically valuing ourselves, others, and whole nations could be extended to intrinsically valuing other individual organisms, species, biological communities, and even the land that helps to sustain those communities, for he believes that our other-regarding sentiments can be focused onto aspects of nature as well. Callicott’s version of the Land Ethic, as it is called, will be explained in two stages. The first stage is his sociobiological account of how we humans come to intrinsically value nature, or alternatively, how nature has intrinsic value. The second stage is his argument for why we should preserve that value. I will argue that his justification for why we should preserve species ’ intrinsic value, in particular, is inadequate. 1 5.1 How We Come to Intrinsically Value Nature To understand how we come to intrinsically value nature, it is useful to analyze the following passage from Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. This is where Leopold’s version of the land ethic was first developed and where Callicott drew on inspiration for his own version of the Land Ethic. 2 This extension of ethics, so far studied only by philosophers, is actually a process in ecological evolution. Its sequences may be described in ecological as well as in philosophical terms. An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct. These are two definitions of one thing...
