Land Ethic Aldo Leopold's Land Term Paper

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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.

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The change in the Vietnam-era zeitgeist in the United States was surely at least partly attributable to the influence of Leopold's land ethic article.

But the zeitgeist has shifted away from such ideals; we are more environmentally conscious than at any period in history, yet much more entranced with conspicuous consumption as well.

At least within our lifetimes the world must go on the way it has been. It will almost certainly never become a sparsely populated Eden with humans clustered about in communes every dozen miles or so. Perhaps the meek (the Amish for instance) may inherit the earth after the great have exhausted themselves destroying it, and perhaps this is how things are going to be in a thousand years or so, but if it happens it will happen accidentally. Such a condition is not something we can strive toward and ever hope to attain as long as human beings are the complicated creatures that they are.

This does not mean that we must relegate Leopold's ethic to a bell jar in some museum for succeeding generations to marvel and wonder at; rather it is something we can appreciate for the ideal it represents. His ethic is utopian and unrealistic, but utopias are nice to think about, even if ultimately unobtainable......

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