Land Ethic

The Land Ethic is a perspective within environmental ethics that grants ethical priority to ecosystems and other ecological entities. Although the Land Ethic is sometimes used to refer to any ecocentric environmental ethic, the phrase originated in the writings of the American ecologist and writer Aldo Leopold (1887 – 1948) and is most commonly identified with Leopold's views.

“Ecocentric” ethics integrates ethics and ecology by bringing such ecological wholes as species, populations, habitat, and ecosystems to the center of ethical consideration. Thus, an ecocentric approach is distinguished from biocentric (“life-centered”) approaches by its emphasis on ecological concepts rather than on individual living animals and plants. Ecocentric ethics also gives ethical consideration to nonliving natural objects, such as rivers, wetlands, and mountain ranges, in ways that a life-centered biocentric ethics does not.

The science of ecology developed during Leopold's lifetime, and he was the first person to call for a radical rethinking of ethics in light of this new holistic science. Leopold's thinking was presented in the posthumously published A Sand County Almanac (1949), and the definitive section of that book, an essay titled “The Land Ethic,” is the first systematic presentation of an ecocentric ethics.

Leopold began that essay by retelling the story of Odysseus, who, on returning from the Trojan War, hanged a dozen of his women slaves for misbehavior. Because slaves were understood as property, Odysseus's action was not seen as unethical or inappropriate. Since that time, ethics has evolved so that moral standing now is extended to all human beings. “The Land Ethic” is Leopold's call to continue this extension of ethics to include land, plants, and animals. Leopold appears to defend a version of biocentric ethics by extending moral consideration, what he termed “biotic rights,” to birds, soils, waters, plants, and animals.

Yet throughout his life, Leopold remained an active hunter and fisherman, and an advocate of other activities that treat natural objects as resources for human use. The apparent inconsistency between advocating biotic rights for natural objects and supporting hunting, fishing, and timber harvesting was resolved by Leopold's insistence that we view the land ethic holistically. It is the “land community” that is granted moral standing. Individual members of that community can still be treated as resources as long as the community itself is respected. The “ecological conscience” teaches that humans are but members of the biotic community—“biotic citizens,” rather than conquerors of nature. Ecology shifts the focus of moral consideration away from the individuals emphasized by biocentric approaches and onto biotic wholes.

Accordingly, the extensionism that is at work in the Land Ethic does not ask that we simply extend moral consideration to other living beings and make room in our moral deliberations for yet another type of individual moral subject. Leopold asks that we make a category shift away from individuals and grant moral standing to communities, symbolically represented as the land. This shift to an ecocentric approach is central to the Land Ethic.

This aspect of the Land Ethic is concisely summarized in Leopold's most celebrated and controversial statement that “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” (from A Sand County Almanac). When combined with some basic ecological observations, this principle can be used to generate the specific normative conclusions of the Land Ethic.

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