Aldo Leopold - relating stories of the land ethic
Aldo Leopold was an American ecologist, forester and environmentalist, who was influential in the forming of modern environmental ethics and wilderness preservation.
Here Leopold relates various stories to illustrate what he terms the land ethic to an interested friend.
Killing the wolf
AL: Looking out across a wilderness – a wild place full of animals, birds, insects, fish in its rivers and plant-life as the first rung up the food-chain, I came to realize that it exists in a sort of balance, a precarious one, I grant you, but a balance nevertheless.
First of all, the vegetable matter is food for the deer, which in turn are the prey of wolves. The land can support only as much as it can support and no more. Man steps into this wild place and shoots a few wolves and a few deer. Nothing much changes – at first. It’s only when more hunters come and the fun begins – shooting wolves because they are wolves – an animal to be feared – why not shoot the blasted things – they prey on the deer and that isn’t good. No deer, no hunting, so kill the wolf and the deer lives.
But the wolves placed limits on the number of deer in the wilderness – without that limit, deer proliferate, increase in numbers, and something happens – the vegetable cover starts to look a bit thin. Even the hunters notice how the juniper saplings are bitten almost down to the ground by the hungry deer. With no natural prey, the deer thrive, until they hit a ceiling – the amount of vegetation will not support the numbers of deer. Something has to give – plant-life becomes scarce – the deer get thin and some die. Plant cover becomes threadbare, the howling winds, violent storms and rushing streams take the bared earth away to silt up an ox-bow down the river a ways.
With the demise of the plant-life, everything starts to run out – topsoil that once was home to that most unassuming of creatures, the earthworm, is now bereft of any. Birds fly to pastures new or die on the fields as winter sets in.
Frost comes and does for what is left of that thin layer of humus that has supported life way back through time. The snow melts and rivulets of dirty brown water flow helter-skelter into a river that natives lower down have begun to nickname, ‘Old Muddy’.
The hunters move on to where they know the deer thrive – they have fun killing wolves on days when deer are few, and the whole thing starts over.
Left alone, the wild places survive, along with every living creature – flora and fauna to the zoologist and the botanist. Let man once walk across it with some design on it and the cycles of life and death, birth and rebirth become disrupted. Such men once called native Indians ignorant and primitive.
Buffalo and deer roamed across this country where none exist today. Ignorance dressed up in all the frippery of civilization has done for them, without it even being aware that it happened because of something done in its name.
The death of a species
AL: For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun. The Cro-Magnon who slew the last mammoth thought only of a loss of meat; the sportsman who shot the last pheasant thought only of the loss of sport; the sailor who fished the last whale out of the ocean thought of his lost livelihood. If we were to die, would the mammoth, the pheasant or the mighty whale mourn us?
RLF: But did not Cro-Magnon hunt the mammoth for food to feed his tribe? The trouble seems to have begun with those of us who kill for no other reason than we can, to show our prowess over the birds and beasts of the field. If we only killed to eat, and slew only what we could eat, the extinct would still be running about.
AL: Think of that great necessity, the fridge-freezer, full to its iced up lid with pieces of fish and meat - deep frozen to keep until we are ready to eat them. That is surely a symbol of what we have become, though it looks as normal to us as a carpet under our feet, or the table surrounded by chairs at which we sit down to eat.
In the time before refrigeration, man placed taboos on foodstuff that couldn’t well survive as something to be eaten more than a day or two after it had been hunted and killed. In climates hotter than this, the meat of the wild boar, while delicious if cooked and eaten immediately, was found to be full of canker and worm if left till the morrow.
The fridge shows our life for what it is. No longer hunter-gatherers, crop-sharers, but industrialists with no time to do our killing, we employ others to do it in factory like repetition, the better to keep costs down. We treat our foodstuffs with preservatives and dyes that we may eat it wholly out of season, imagining its bright hues of red and yellow, green and purple to be natural, to look delicious, whatever it may taste like.
The fridge shows us up for what we really are and have become – accumulators, stockpilers rooted to that ‘science’ of artificial shortages and gluts, economics with its price elasticity to account for why people continue to buy something though its price has gone through the roof; with its laws of supply and demand – self-fulfilling prophecies by which we live and breathe, and by which we may one day die.
The forming of a land ethic
RLF: What do you mean by the term ‘land-ethic’ and why do we need one?
AL: As you know, land is designated chiefly as property, owned by someone, with a price on it. Up until now, owning property entails privileges but no obligations. A man’s land is there to do with as he sees fit. There are some limits on what he may do in some cases, but much land lies unprotected, particularly in those places whose laws are not fully developed, operational and enforceable.
RLF: But surely, even if so much land is under the law, limited as to its use, we would do well to adopt an ethic towards it as we have towards each other, if we are to save ourselves and the Earth that is our home and ultimate provider.
AL: That is precisely my point; that in the absence of any overall control of how land is misused and abused, what we need is a sort of charter of human rights, applied to land rather than people.
If destroying land becomes as unthinkable, for the many, as destroying human life, then we could be content that these abuses would cease. Do not forget that although temporary measures can be put in place to protect the integrity of the land and everything that lives on it, once the ecological threat ceases or is seen to have reduced, there are many who would go back to the old ways to make the cycle of destruction begin again.
If we come to see man, not as conquering Nature, but as cohabiting with it, living in peace with it, not placing it under duress, then our future would not look so dim.
As it is, we view land purely as economic units to be harvested, as so much space to be covered in concrete or worse, as a place to dump refuse, to despoil without a second thought.
RLF: That is surely not true of the land in national parks, protected by statute.
AL: That is true, there are pockets of land that have some significance to us and where exploitation is minimal, but what of the land that lies unprotected, demeaned and disrespected, what of that land? Does that land have any right to not be destroyed; I think not!
RLF: Which land are you thinking of?
AL: Land is land, is it not? All land is but a piece of the surface of the planet and as such is deserving of our respect, and yet much of it still goes without regard.
Take those parcels of land between the railway and the siding, or land that adjoins the highway in grassy banking and side of deep cuttings – how is that regarded? Is such land not regarded as unable to be saved, as passed its best, as so much detritus from our economic activity – it has paid the ultimate price, devoid of any fertility, stained beyond use.
RLF: But what use is such land to anyone?
AL: That is the question I want most earnestly to remove from people’s lips, not just from their lips but from their minds also. Any land, all land is the base of the pyramid of life, from its soil which gives plants sustenance, fixing nitrogen from the air we breathe, into a form that can be used to create cells of living vegetation. Insects feed upon plants and fertilise them, animals – herbivores live on the plant life and carnivores and omnivores feed on those animals and plants that are edible, by taste or taboo.
Yet we undermine the construction of that pyramid at its base level, toppling each until we achieve our own undoing.
This we do to accumulate – chattels, goods and of course, the money to purchase them beyond what we could possibly need. And to top it off, to stand up and speak against this wanton disregard of the pyramidal structure of life on Earth is to commit the sin of sins, to utter ideals that seem only to appeal to the deranged, dangerous or deluded.
RLF: But man has got to live, to survive, and not to freeze in the dark.
AL: Have we not outgrown that old chestnut – in the manufacturing of want, not based upon need of any kind but rather upon what we think we need, looking over our shoulders at someone who has more. We were told not to covet and yet our every move is made in that direction, to feed a desire that is unworthy of us.
RLF: You should add, then, an ethic of how to live in accordance with the needs of the land beneath our feet, for it seems to me, now, that what is really needed is a land ethic and an ethic to accompany it, an ethic of the self-worth of man devoid of any measures of his worth that stem from how much he has, be it of money, land or chattels, as you call them.
AL: That is well said, my friend, for are not the two intertwined? And if they are, it is as much an admittance that something is amiss with us, if we place value on something that can be bought with money. We had better return to the thoughts of Henry David Thoreau – not placing his tenets in ridicule but seeing the truth of them and the effects they would bring to both our way of life, I might say, our quality of life, and the consideration we afford that from which all life springs – land.
RLF: Returning to our newly formed and accepted obligations stemming from ownership of land, is it not the case that such have no meaning without conscience, and that in consequence, what we must do is to extend our social conscience – well developed as it is, to a conscience that includes land as well as human beings, all living creatures – flora and fauna, right down the vertices of that pyramid of which you spoke earlier, right down to the soil that feeds each of us in its way.
AL: Exactly, and that means moving away from only accepting evidence that is economic in nature as valid in any argument. This is no more or less than a revamping of a theory of value that includes more of what has traditionally been omitted and less of what has been included – a balance sheet that does not just include numbers.
Land such as marsh, bog, dune, desert, and, as I have said, those marginal places that have almost had the title of ‘land’ taken away – all those places must be weighed as having value.
RLF: But who can lead us out of this morass of ignorance in which we are habitually used to viewing all things, organic or inorganic, as merely a provider of honey to be dropped into our mouths?
AL: We must look to where we have traditionally been used to looking for such a lead; from our belief systems – their creators and the myths that sustain them, and to education, from day one until the final day.
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The land ethic
AL: The problem with ethics is that we only seem to be able to hold them and be directed by them with something we can understand, or feel, love or have faith in. If the land is largely not consciously considered by the majority of us, how are we to be guided by anything? I think that is half the problem; that apart from our basic religious beliefs, which those lacking in any devotion take for granted, or at most hardly consider, we are left with the myths of Prometheus and the like to explain our stance towards it.
Since the Enclosure Acts, rendering most people cut off from it by wall and fence, land has come to be looked upon as an economic entity only, with minor recreational uses to afford it some respect and protection.
Bodies such as The National Trust have made it their business to build up the notion that the land, as well as those historic sites upon it are in some way worthy of our time and our charity.
RLF: Except in cases in which a conflict of interests is perceived – a motorway runs through fine arable land or divides some ancient tumuli, and then the land and anything upon it inevitably lose out to the urban sprawl and the town and country planner’s deadly eye. Some of our best known dams and reservoirs, arterial highways and new green field industrial sites have cost us dear. The lost villages of Derwent and Ashopton in the valley that is now flooded by the Derwent and Ladybower reservoirs were both submerged that the cities have their supply of drinking water.
AL: What passes for expediency and necessity at the time, can often be seen, with hindsight, to have been a waste of a natural habitat – for what cannot later be considered so, if we think in terms of that pyramid structure of living, we spoke of earlier.
How to mediate between the two conflicting claims on a piece of land is the chief difficulty here; one man’s viable alternative is another’s home, one habitat here is no less a one yonder, and so on.
But to return to our main focus; we must not assume, though we generally have done, that because a particular increase in density enriched human life, that any future indefinite increase will enrich our lives correspondingly. We are habitually used to depending upon extrapolations that while looking logical on paper, take into account only the smallest handful of variables, chief among these the effects, as we have said, that militate against economic forecasts, and that inconvenience the least number of people.
A land ethic would have us confront what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient, before we moved in with bulldozers to revamp whole areas and lose what cannot ever be replaced.
I can imagine the arguments that will be ranged against objections of this sort – ethical and esthetic. They will be based upon the assumption that we cannot afford those luxuries – that what matters are livelihoods, economic growth in perpetuity, as if we can have that without paying a high price – the highest.
We need to say that land development is right when it preserves the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community – the pyramid. If it does not then it is wrong. The difficulty lies in getting social approbation for actions that correspond with ethical and esthetic considerations, and social disapproval for actions that do not correspond with them, and to obtain those, people need to be educated in ways that allow them to see through the economist's fallacies to those factors that are detrimental to our lives on Earth.
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Education – trading awareness for things of lesser value, or striving to see the whole
RLF: The problem, as I see it, with the ‘land-ethic’ is how to regard non-human organisms as ends in themselves and not merely as means to our own ends – how to relinquish the hold instrumentality has on our minds.
AL: The answer lies in education – and in ways that you might not readily see. Let me start by asking you why a subject like geography is taught in schools. Is it taught so that we may have mapmakers, geologists, surveyors, or is it taught for some other reason?
RLF: I would say that the answer is yes to both, although I am not fully aware why the answer should be yes to the second part; that it is taught for some other reason.
AL: Well, first of all, let me say that you are correct; we are taught geography so that we may have some scholars in that discipline – to practice cartography, geology or surveying, as well as some to teach geography in our schools and universities, but geography is also included in our educational curriculums because were it not to be we would have gaps in our view of how our world is.
I used the example of geography, but I may equally have used the subject areas of Physics, Chemistry, English Literature, History or any of our academic disciplines at present taught in schools and later at colleges and universities.
The reason is that it is the role of education, not merely to fit us for a particular way of earning a living – a purely a vocational matter, but rather education is a way of making us fit for life in all its varied aspects and hues. If it were not, we should have dispensed with most subjects.
The fact of the matter is that in learning about the geography of our world, or in learning of its history if you prefer, we come to see how the sum of its parts fits into a whole, and in so doing find out where we dovetail into the arrangement, for we are as integral a part of Earth as any mountain, stream, ant or eagle. And it is in our education that we find that out.
Of course, we do not stop learning when we graduate - leave those buildings – schools, colleges and universities – when we vacate those classrooms, lecture theatres and laboratories and libraries – at least we should not. On the contrary, it is usually when our formal education ends that we are trained to earn our living, and come to realize that all we were taught in school informs us later as citizens.
I remember the British Prime Minister of the day, while visiting a university campus somewhere in England, asking a young woman what she was doing. The post-graduate student replied that she was taking Elizabethan Studies. The PM smiled in her distinctive way, and made the comment,
“What a luxury!”
I thought then, as I still do, how trite and condescending that comment was, and how indicative it was of her ignorance of the world and how it turns on its axis. She undoubtedly meant that another expert on Elizabethan times was something we could well do without; that the taxpayers’ money could have been better spent training an engineer of some kind.
How wrong of her, I thought. If we lack awareness of our own history, with all its colours, its pitfalls, mistakes and triumphs, how are we to manage to avoid repeating the same mistakes of the past, or omitting to include those triumphal acts in the ways we live today.
The whole is the sum of its parts, and it is something much more; our education tells us that. And, as it is with us, so it is with the natural world that surrounds us and of which we are a part. If we discard as trivial to our interests things like mountains, streams, ants or eagles, we do ourselves the same disservice as we would if we discarded a subject like geography from our national curriculum.
The whole picture is not ours to know fully, but it is ours to strive to learn about. An ethic of the land would be invaluable in that respect – who knows; it may even find its way onto our educational syllabus before very long.
RLF: That it isn’t at present a subject of study at any level other than in higher education suggests it is either in its infancy as a field of study, or not deemed worthy to be studied.
AL: I would say that both are not far from the truth, although I would expect your latter explanation to not be the case for very much longer. It seems to me that the part played by every organism as a subject area ready to be studied, particularly in terms of the ethical perspective we have spoken of is probably still a long way off becoming a mainstream subject, particularly in schools.
This should not deter us from constructing an ethical framework on which to hang, as it were, several important concepts.
RLF: What would those be?
AL: Things like the relationship between those species traditionally regarded as pests. We refer to species of plants that proliferate without cultivation as weeds, do we not? And that informs us of their value to us, but more needs to be done to use such fecund species to colonise those pieces of land sorely in need of cover of vegetation.
Our prejudice towards certain species of both flora and fauna needs to be re-examined to determine if we are not biased against them for no other reason than they figure in what used to be called ‘old wives’ tales’ and such superstitions.
And we should look critically at all forms of what is euphemistically referred to as sport that involves the slaying of animals. Those species regarded as almost surplus to our requirements – pests, nuisances, predators, should be studied along with the niches that support them.
Similarly, we would do well to attempt to utilize those areas of land not normally thought of as being of any use. I spoke earlier of grass verges and embankments along highways and railways, introducing species of plants, for example, that will support other species so that they too can be viewed as useful, instead of as merely waste land.
Even that term – waste land, should be discarded as a misnomer; no land being thought of as a waste of anything. Gradations of usefulness, not necessarily to man, you understand, could be constructed on the basis of the bio-mass that can be supported on any particular piece of land.
And finally, we must re-examine those assumptions so commonly used in economics to ascertain whether there could not be ways of factoring in what have been regarded as unwanted qualities, while allotting a lesser proportion to those parts of the equation that only regard the value or property advantageous to man as worthy of consideration.
RLF: Doing that would have repercussions in all sorts of fields and disciplines, I think.
AL: And would be long overdue, knocking some off the complacent perch they are so comfortably sat on.
Robert L. Fielding
Aldo Leopold was an American ecologist, forester and environmentalist, who was influential in the forming of modern environmental ethics and wilderness preservation.
Here Leopold relates various stories to illustrate what he terms the land ethic to an interested friend.
Killing the wolf
AL: Looking out across a wilderness – a wild place full of animals, birds, insects, fish in its rivers and plant-life as the first rung up the food-chain, I came to realize that it exists in a sort of balance, a precarious one, I grant you, but a balance nevertheless.
First of all, the vegetable matter is food for the deer, which in turn are the prey of wolves. The land can support only as much as it can support and no more. Man steps into this wild place and shoots a few wolves and a few deer. Nothing much changes – at first. It’s only when more hunters come and the fun begins – shooting wolves because they are wolves – an animal to be feared – why not shoot the blasted things – they prey on the deer and that isn’t good. No deer, no hunting, so kill the wolf and the deer lives.
But the wolves placed limits on the number of deer in the wilderness – without that limit, deer proliferate, increase in numbers, and something happens – the vegetable cover starts to look a bit thin. Even the hunters notice how the juniper saplings are bitten almost down to the ground by the hungry deer. With no natural prey, the deer thrive, until they hit a ceiling – the amount of vegetation will not support the numbers of deer. Something has to give – plant-life becomes scarce – the deer get thin and some die. Plant cover becomes threadbare, the howling winds, violent storms and rushing streams take the bared earth away to silt up an ox-bow down the river a ways.
With the demise of the plant-life, everything starts to run out – topsoil that once was home to that most unassuming of creatures, the earthworm, is now bereft of any. Birds fly to pastures new or die on the fields as winter sets in.
Frost comes and does for what is left of that thin layer of humus that has supported life way back through time. The snow melts and rivulets of dirty brown water flow helter-skelter into a river that natives lower down have begun to nickname, ‘Old Muddy’.
The hunters move on to where they know the deer thrive – they have fun killing wolves on days when deer are few, and the whole thing starts over.
Left alone, the wild places survive, along with every living creature – flora and fauna to the zoologist and the botanist. Let man once walk across it with some design on it and the cycles of life and death, birth and rebirth become disrupted. Such men once called native Indians ignorant and primitive.
Buffalo and deer roamed across this country where none exist today. Ignorance dressed up in all the frippery of civilization has done for them, without it even being aware that it happened because of something done in its name.
The death of a species
AL: For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun. The Cro-Magnon who slew the last mammoth thought only of a loss of meat; the sportsman who shot the last pheasant thought only of the loss of sport; the sailor who fished the last whale out of the ocean thought of his lost livelihood. If we were to die, would the mammoth, the pheasant or the mighty whale mourn us?
RLF: But did not Cro-Magnon hunt the mammoth for food to feed his tribe? The trouble seems to have begun with those of us who kill for no other reason than we can, to show our prowess over the birds and beasts of the field. If we only killed to eat, and slew only what we could eat, the extinct would still be running about.
AL: Think of that great necessity, the fridge-freezer, full to its iced up lid with pieces of fish and meat - deep frozen to keep until we are ready to eat them. That is surely a symbol of what we have become, though it looks as normal to us as a carpet under our feet, or the table surrounded by chairs at which we sit down to eat.
In the time before refrigeration, man placed taboos on foodstuff that couldn’t well survive as something to be eaten more than a day or two after it had been hunted and killed. In climates hotter than this, the meat of the wild boar, while delicious if cooked and eaten immediately, was found to be full of canker and worm if left till the morrow.
The fridge shows our life for what it is. No longer hunter-gatherers, crop-sharers, but industrialists with no time to do our killing, we employ others to do it in factory like repetition, the better to keep costs down. We treat our foodstuffs with preservatives and dyes that we may eat it wholly out of season, imagining its bright hues of red and yellow, green and purple to be natural, to look delicious, whatever it may taste like.
The fridge shows us up for what we really are and have become – accumulators, stockpilers rooted to that ‘science’ of artificial shortages and gluts, economics with its price elasticity to account for why people continue to buy something though its price has gone through the roof; with its laws of supply and demand – self-fulfilling prophecies by which we live and breathe, and by which we may one day die.
The forming of a land ethic
RLF: What do you mean by the term ‘land-ethic’ and why do we need one?
AL: As you know, land is designated chiefly as property, owned by someone, with a price on it. Up until now, owning property entails privileges but no obligations. A man’s land is there to do with as he sees fit. There are some limits on what he may do in some cases, but much land lies unprotected, particularly in those places whose laws are not fully developed, operational and enforceable.
RLF: But surely, even if so much land is under the law, limited as to its use, we would do well to adopt an ethic towards it as we have towards each other, if we are to save ourselves and the Earth that is our home and ultimate provider.
AL: That is precisely my point; that in the absence of any overall control of how land is misused and abused, what we need is a sort of charter of human rights, applied to land rather than people.
If destroying land becomes as unthinkable, for the many, as destroying human life, then we could be content that these abuses would cease. Do not forget that although temporary measures can be put in place to protect the integrity of the land and everything that lives on it, once the ecological threat ceases or is seen to have reduced, there are many who would go back to the old ways to make the cycle of destruction begin again.
If we come to see man, not as conquering Nature, but as cohabiting with it, living in peace with it, not placing it under duress, then our future would not look so dim.
As it is, we view land purely as economic units to be harvested, as so much space to be covered in concrete or worse, as a place to dump refuse, to despoil without a second thought.
RLF: That is surely not true of the land in national parks, protected by statute.
AL: That is true, there are pockets of land that have some significance to us and where exploitation is minimal, but what of the land that lies unprotected, demeaned and disrespected, what of that land? Does that land have any right to not be destroyed; I think not!
RLF: Which land are you thinking of?
AL: Land is land, is it not? All land is but a piece of the surface of the planet and as such is deserving of our respect, and yet much of it still goes without regard.
Take those parcels of land between the railway and the siding, or land that adjoins the highway in grassy banking and side of deep cuttings – how is that regarded? Is such land not regarded as unable to be saved, as passed its best, as so much detritus from our economic activity – it has paid the ultimate price, devoid of any fertility, stained beyond use.
RLF: But what use is such land to anyone?
AL: That is the question I want most earnestly to remove from people’s lips, not just from their lips but from their minds also. Any land, all land is the base of the pyramid of life, from its soil which gives plants sustenance, fixing nitrogen from the air we breathe, into a form that can be used to create cells of living vegetation. Insects feed upon plants and fertilise them, animals – herbivores live on the plant life and carnivores and omnivores feed on those animals and plants that are edible, by taste or taboo.
Yet we undermine the construction of that pyramid at its base level, toppling each until we achieve our own undoing.
This we do to accumulate – chattels, goods and of course, the money to purchase them beyond what we could possibly need. And to top it off, to stand up and speak against this wanton disregard of the pyramidal structure of life on Earth is to commit the sin of sins, to utter ideals that seem only to appeal to the deranged, dangerous or deluded.
RLF: But man has got to live, to survive, and not to freeze in the dark.
AL: Have we not outgrown that old chestnut – in the manufacturing of want, not based upon need of any kind but rather upon what we think we need, looking over our shoulders at someone who has more. We were told not to covet and yet our every move is made in that direction, to feed a desire that is unworthy of us.
RLF: You should add, then, an ethic of how to live in accordance with the needs of the land beneath our feet, for it seems to me, now, that what is really needed is a land ethic and an ethic to accompany it, an ethic of the self-worth of man devoid of any measures of his worth that stem from how much he has, be it of money, land or chattels, as you call them.
AL: That is well said, my friend, for are not the two intertwined? And if they are, it is as much an admittance that something is amiss with us, if we place value on something that can be bought with money. We had better return to the thoughts of Henry David Thoreau – not placing his tenets in ridicule but seeing the truth of them and the effects they would bring to both our way of life, I might say, our quality of life, and the consideration we afford that from which all life springs – land.
RLF: Returning to our newly formed and accepted obligations stemming from ownership of land, is it not the case that such have no meaning without conscience, and that in consequence, what we must do is to extend our social conscience – well developed as it is, to a conscience that includes land as well as human beings, all living creatures – flora and fauna, right down the vertices of that pyramid of which you spoke earlier, right down to the soil that feeds each of us in its way.
AL: Exactly, and that means moving away from only accepting evidence that is economic in nature as valid in any argument. This is no more or less than a revamping of a theory of value that includes more of what has traditionally been omitted and less of what has been included – a balance sheet that does not just include numbers.
Land such as marsh, bog, dune, desert, and, as I have said, those marginal places that have almost had the title of ‘land’ taken away – all those places must be weighed as having value.
RLF: But who can lead us out of this morass of ignorance in which we are habitually used to viewing all things, organic or inorganic, as merely a provider of honey to be dropped into our mouths?
AL: We must look to where we have traditionally been used to looking for such a lead; from our belief systems – their creators and the myths that sustain them, and to education, from day one until the final day.
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The land ethic
AL: The problem with ethics is that we only seem to be able to hold them and be directed by them with something we can understand, or feel, love or have faith in. If the land is largely not consciously considered by the majority of us, how are we to be guided by anything? I think that is half the problem; that apart from our basic religious beliefs, which those lacking in any devotion take for granted, or at most hardly consider, we are left with the myths of Prometheus and the like to explain our stance towards it.
Since the Enclosure Acts, rendering most people cut off from it by wall and fence, land has come to be looked upon as an economic entity only, with minor recreational uses to afford it some respect and protection.
Bodies such as The National Trust have made it their business to build up the notion that the land, as well as those historic sites upon it are in some way worthy of our time and our charity.
RLF: Except in cases in which a conflict of interests is perceived – a motorway runs through fine arable land or divides some ancient tumuli, and then the land and anything upon it inevitably lose out to the urban sprawl and the town and country planner’s deadly eye. Some of our best known dams and reservoirs, arterial highways and new green field industrial sites have cost us dear. The lost villages of Derwent and Ashopton in the valley that is now flooded by the Derwent and Ladybower reservoirs were both submerged that the cities have their supply of drinking water.
AL: What passes for expediency and necessity at the time, can often be seen, with hindsight, to have been a waste of a natural habitat – for what cannot later be considered so, if we think in terms of that pyramid structure of living, we spoke of earlier.
How to mediate between the two conflicting claims on a piece of land is the chief difficulty here; one man’s viable alternative is another’s home, one habitat here is no less a one yonder, and so on.
But to return to our main focus; we must not assume, though we generally have done, that because a particular increase in density enriched human life, that any future indefinite increase will enrich our lives correspondingly. We are habitually used to depending upon extrapolations that while looking logical on paper, take into account only the smallest handful of variables, chief among these the effects, as we have said, that militate against economic forecasts, and that inconvenience the least number of people.
A land ethic would have us confront what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient, before we moved in with bulldozers to revamp whole areas and lose what cannot ever be replaced.
I can imagine the arguments that will be ranged against objections of this sort – ethical and esthetic. They will be based upon the assumption that we cannot afford those luxuries – that what matters are livelihoods, economic growth in perpetuity, as if we can have that without paying a high price – the highest.
We need to say that land development is right when it preserves the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community – the pyramid. If it does not then it is wrong. The difficulty lies in getting social approbation for actions that correspond with ethical and esthetic considerations, and social disapproval for actions that do not correspond with them, and to obtain those, people need to be educated in ways that allow them to see through the economist's fallacies to those factors that are detrimental to our lives on Earth.
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Education – trading awareness for things of lesser value, or striving to see the whole
RLF: The problem, as I see it, with the ‘land-ethic’ is how to regard non-human organisms as ends in themselves and not merely as means to our own ends – how to relinquish the hold instrumentality has on our minds.
AL: The answer lies in education – and in ways that you might not readily see. Let me start by asking you why a subject like geography is taught in schools. Is it taught so that we may have mapmakers, geologists, surveyors, or is it taught for some other reason?
RLF: I would say that the answer is yes to both, although I am not fully aware why the answer should be yes to the second part; that it is taught for some other reason.
AL: Well, first of all, let me say that you are correct; we are taught geography so that we may have some scholars in that discipline – to practice cartography, geology or surveying, as well as some to teach geography in our schools and universities, but geography is also included in our educational curriculums because were it not to be we would have gaps in our view of how our world is.
I used the example of geography, but I may equally have used the subject areas of Physics, Chemistry, English Literature, History or any of our academic disciplines at present taught in schools and later at colleges and universities.
The reason is that it is the role of education, not merely to fit us for a particular way of earning a living – a purely a vocational matter, but rather education is a way of making us fit for life in all its varied aspects and hues. If it were not, we should have dispensed with most subjects.
The fact of the matter is that in learning about the geography of our world, or in learning of its history if you prefer, we come to see how the sum of its parts fits into a whole, and in so doing find out where we dovetail into the arrangement, for we are as integral a part of Earth as any mountain, stream, ant or eagle. And it is in our education that we find that out.
Of course, we do not stop learning when we graduate - leave those buildings – schools, colleges and universities – when we vacate those classrooms, lecture theatres and laboratories and libraries – at least we should not. On the contrary, it is usually when our formal education ends that we are trained to earn our living, and come to realize that all we were taught in school informs us later as citizens.
I remember the British Prime Minister of the day, while visiting a university campus somewhere in England, asking a young woman what she was doing. The post-graduate student replied that she was taking Elizabethan Studies. The PM smiled in her distinctive way, and made the comment,
“What a luxury!”
I thought then, as I still do, how trite and condescending that comment was, and how indicative it was of her ignorance of the world and how it turns on its axis. She undoubtedly meant that another expert on Elizabethan times was something we could well do without; that the taxpayers’ money could have been better spent training an engineer of some kind.
How wrong of her, I thought. If we lack awareness of our own history, with all its colours, its pitfalls, mistakes and triumphs, how are we to manage to avoid repeating the same mistakes of the past, or omitting to include those triumphal acts in the ways we live today.
The whole is the sum of its parts, and it is something much more; our education tells us that. And, as it is with us, so it is with the natural world that surrounds us and of which we are a part. If we discard as trivial to our interests things like mountains, streams, ants or eagles, we do ourselves the same disservice as we would if we discarded a subject like geography from our national curriculum.
The whole picture is not ours to know fully, but it is ours to strive to learn about. An ethic of the land would be invaluable in that respect – who knows; it may even find its way onto our educational syllabus before very long.
RLF: That it isn’t at present a subject of study at any level other than in higher education suggests it is either in its infancy as a field of study, or not deemed worthy to be studied.
AL: I would say that both are not far from the truth, although I would expect your latter explanation to not be the case for very much longer. It seems to me that the part played by every organism as a subject area ready to be studied, particularly in terms of the ethical perspective we have spoken of is probably still a long way off becoming a mainstream subject, particularly in schools.
This should not deter us from constructing an ethical framework on which to hang, as it were, several important concepts.
RLF: What would those be?
AL: Things like the relationship between those species traditionally regarded as pests. We refer to species of plants that proliferate without cultivation as weeds, do we not? And that informs us of their value to us, but more needs to be done to use such fecund species to colonise those pieces of land sorely in need of cover of vegetation.
Our prejudice towards certain species of both flora and fauna needs to be re-examined to determine if we are not biased against them for no other reason than they figure in what used to be called ‘old wives’ tales’ and such superstitions.
And we should look critically at all forms of what is euphemistically referred to as sport that involves the slaying of animals. Those species regarded as almost surplus to our requirements – pests, nuisances, predators, should be studied along with the niches that support them.
Similarly, we would do well to attempt to utilize those areas of land not normally thought of as being of any use. I spoke earlier of grass verges and embankments along highways and railways, introducing species of plants, for example, that will support other species so that they too can be viewed as useful, instead of as merely waste land.
Even that term – waste land, should be discarded as a misnomer; no land being thought of as a waste of anything. Gradations of usefulness, not necessarily to man, you understand, could be constructed on the basis of the bio-mass that can be supported on any particular piece of land.
And finally, we must re-examine those assumptions so commonly used in economics to ascertain whether there could not be ways of factoring in what have been regarded as unwanted qualities, while allotting a lesser proportion to those parts of the equation that only regard the value or property advantageous to man as worthy of consideration.
RLF: Doing that would have repercussions in all sorts of fields and disciplines, I think.
AL: And would be long overdue, knocking some off the complacent perch they are so comfortably sat on.
Robert L. Fielding
Posted 17th May in:
