The Constancy of Leopold's Land Ethic

Abstract

Aldo Leopold's approach to environmental management changed drastically between the early 1920s, when he advocated predator eradication, and 1944, when he drafted “Thinking Like a Mountain.” How are we to understand these changes? It is shown that, early in his career, Leopold developed the basic elements of a conservation ethic, borrowing key elements from the Russian organicist P. D. Ouspensky and from A. T. Hadley, an American pragmatist who was president of Yale University when Leopold was a student there. Hadley's pragmatism counseled that we act on the wisdom embodied in the intuitive perceptions of our forefathers. While Leopold changed the presentation of his conservation ethic over the years, he never gave up these key ideas, traces of which remain in the final version of “The Land Ethic.” The changes in Leopold's management strategies were not due to a change in metaphysical or moral views, but to his evolving experience as a forester and game manager. Leopold learned that “violent” strategies, such as monocultural planting of trees, pervasive agricultural management of fragile ecosystems and, above all predator eradication, led to unforeseen and unwelcome results. Leopold recognized that we may never have adequate information to manipulate natural systems for maximal human utility without diminishing their vitality. He therefore lost faith in “economic biology” as a guide to environmental management. Leopold's changing views on management resulted from his experience as an environmental manager, not from a conversion from utilitarian anthropocentrism to biocentric nonanthropocentrism. While Leopold was drawn to Ouspensky's organicism, and he hoped Americans would through a profound change in their perceptions of nature adopt such a view eventually, he believed throughout his career that longsighted anthropocentrism provides an adequate basis for conservation practices.

Giving voice to the future in sustainability: Retrospective assessment to learn prospective stakeholder engagement

“…The idea of sustainability has deep roots in the environmental movements of the 20 th Century and can be traced at least as far back as the debate in the U.S. over the Hetch Hetchy dam (Nash, 1982;Robinson, 2004), one of the first major public controversies over the environmental legacy owed to the future. This line of thinking about sustainability before the term was used can be traced to Leopold (Norton, 1988) to William Vogt (1948) and then to proponents of the limits to growth argument (Meadows et al, 1972).…”

New Perspectives for Sustainable Natural Resources Management

“…People are not simply arguing about optimizing lev<tls of competing uses provided by management. We may be seeing what Norton (1988) calls the "convergence hypothesis," a view that long-term human interests are dependent upon a harmonious relationship with the rest of nature (in contrast to the view favoring man's dominion over nature). One thing is clear: the controversies in land management today are symptoms of deep and complex human feelings about the environment and the special heritage of public lands.…”

Links between ecology and ecophilosophy, ethics and the requirements of environmental management

“…Weir 1992). Even Leopold retreated from simplistic views about the complexity of nature; for example he drastically changed his views on predators (Norton 1988), although some crucial data that swayed him were erroneously interpreted (see discussion in Botkin 1990). Odum (1989) stated that 'the web of life on which our own life depends is tough and resilient, but once destroyed it becomes extremely expensive, perhaps impossible, to restore within a human lifetime', an explicit statement of some point of no return in how far we can push ecosystems.…”