Aldo Leopold, 1887-1948 Grew up in Iowa, hiking and hunting with his father, Carl, along Miss. River marshes. Went to Yale, majoring in forestry, then

• Aldo Leopold, 1887-1948• Grew up in Iowa, hiking and

hunting with his father, Carl, along Miss. River marshes.

• Went to Yale, majoring in forestry, then joined Forest Service, working in the Carson Nat’l Forest in NM in 1911.

• Albuquerque, Grand Canyon, etc. Secretary of Albuquerque’s Chamber of Commerce, writing, surveying, game improvement plans, soil conservation…

• From after WWI to 1924, oversaw all federal forests in the West.

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• 1922, wrote argument to permanently preserve 750,000 acres of Gila River Valley…father of National Forest Wilderness System

The GILA NATIONAL FOREST is one of the nation's largest (approximately 3.3 million acres, nearly one-fourth of which is set aside as designated wilderness) and most scenic year-round recreation and natural areas. It contains more federal land than any other national forest outside Alaska,





• 1924, transferred to Madison.• 1928, quit, worked writing, consultant

on conservation and game• Game Management, 1933, forged a

new interdisciplinary science• Travels to Germany, Mexico• Founds Wilderness Society• 1935, buys worn out farm “The Shack”

near Baraboo, WI, the sand counties• 1948, dies of a heart attack while

fighting neighbor’s brush fire• SCA published posthumously



• Leopold family, 1939, “The Shack”





Roaring Twenties

• Progressive regulations lapsed or ignored; business left to itself

• President Harding presided over one of the most corrupt administrations; no concern for conservation

• Electric motor, internal combustion engine, cars

• Travel increases– Park Service shoots mountain lions so tourists can

see more elk in Yellowstone

• Agriculture increases 250% over 1914 levels…Great Dust Bowl

New Ecology

• Sir Arthur Tansley 1871-1955





Trophic levels; pyramid structure; food chains

“The Varmint Question” 1915

“It is well-known that predatory animals are continuing to eat the cream of the grower’s profits, and it hardly needs to be argued that, with a game supply as low as it is, a reduction in the predatory animal population is bound to help the situation…Whatever may have been the value of the work accomplished by bounty systems, poisoning, and trapping, individual or governmental, the fact remains that varmints continue to thrive and their reduction can be accomplished only by means of a practical, vigorous, and comprehensive plan of action.”

• But in later writing, even just in 1925, he claims that this “conservationist” picture is wrong… ecology teaches us that nature is interconnected and even “alive”

• Hence by SCA he regrets the time when he was “young and full of trigger-itch” …instead we must “think like a mountain”.



Sand County Almanac

• Dubos: “the Holy Writ of American conservationists”

• Foreman: “not only the most important conservation book ever written, it is the most important book ever written”

• Stegner: one of the prophetic books, the utterance of an American Isaiah”

• Read by millions…comparable to Walden and Silent Spring



• The mouse “who knows that grass grows in order that mice may store it as underground haystacks”…the hawk, who “has no opinion why grass grows, but he is well aware that snow melts in order that hawks may again catch mice” (4)

• “Abraham knew exactly what the land was for: it was to drip milk and honey into Abraham’s mouth. At the present moment, the assurance with which we regard this assumption is inverse to our degree of education” (220)

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“When the private landowner is asked to perform some unprofitable act for the good of the community, he today assents only with outstretched palm. If the act costs him cash this is fair and proper, but when it costs only forethought, open-mindedness or time, the issue is at least debatable…[A] system of conservation based solely on economic self-interest is hopelessly lopsided. It tends to ignore, and thus eventually to eliminate, many elements in the land community that lack commercial value, but that are (as far as we know) essential to its healthy functioning. It assumes, falsely, I think, that the economic parts of the biotic clock will function without the uneconomic parts. It tends to relegate to government many functions eventually too large, too complex, or too widely dispersed to be performed by government.An ethical obligation on the part of the private owner is the only visible remedy for these situation.” (230)

• Life cycle of an oak tree

• How important the tree diseases are for the health of his farm


We cannot discern these patterns in the individual, or in short periods of time. The most intense scrutiny of an individual rabbit tells us nothing of cycles. The cycle concept springs from a scrutiny of the mass through decades.

This raises the disquieting question: do human populations have behavior patterns of which we are unaware, but which we help to execute? Are mobs and wars, unrests and revolutions, cut of such cloth? …

It is reasonable to suppose that our social processes have a higher volitional content than those of a rabbit, but it is also reasonable to suppose that we, as a species, contain population behavior patterns of which nothing is known because circumstance has never evoked them. …

Ecology is now teaching us to search in animal populations for analogies to our own problems. (186-187)

Themes

• Preservation/ conservation

• Individual responsibility; regulations can only do so much

• Ecology and interconnectedness of parts of nature

• Our ignorance of the ecological webs… precautionary principle?



Land Ethic

• “extension of ethics”… “the land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively, the land.”

• We need to admit “that birds should continue as a matter of biotic right”



“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.”

Similarities to Gaia Hypothesis



Ethical InterludeA subject is morally considerable if and only if…??

– Male property owner of certain race

– Male or female of certain race

– Male or female of any race

• Utilitarianism: says that one should judge an action morally by its consequences: one should maximize the good. An action is right if the consequences of its contribution (for those morally considerable) are no worse than its alternative’s consequences.

• Rights-based views. Those who are morally considerable are bequeathed certain basic rights. Libertarianism: “negative” rights. Egalitarianism: negative and opportunity rights.



Who is Morally Considerable?

Anthropocentric

People (adult rational homo sapiens)?

Non-anthropocentric

People and upper mammals?

Conscious beings capable of suffering?

Living animals?

More?

• Who is morally considerable?

• Leopold: biotic community

Non-anthropocentricists

individuals

collectives

New battle line: E.g. “Can animal rights-advocates be environmentalists?

Virtues

• Killing a mosquito is not so bad

• Saving a species in a zoo without an existing ecosystem not so good

• Learns lesson of misinformed land management

• Comprehensive system with clear-ish decision procedure based to some extent on science


Criticism I

• Is/ought gap…ecological facts, by themselves, don’t prove that “ecological integrity and stability” are ethical values– Response: Hume-Darwin-Leopold moral

sentimentalism?

• Why is the preservation of an energy circuit or food chain a good in itself?

• What ecological model is he using, and why is it normatively distinguished?

• Is the “integrity” of an ecosystem a well-defined term of ecology?

Criticism II

• Ethical holism is “totalitarian” (Kheel), or “environmental fascism” (Regan). Subverts rights of individuals to right of the whole…followed to its logical extreme, it condones genocide.

Leopold and Hunting

• “there are four categories of outdoors men: deer hunters, duck hunters, bird hunters, and non-hunters…The deer hunter habitually watches the next bend, the duck hunter watches the skyline; the bird hunter watches the dog; the non-hunter does not watch”

“The Deer Swath”, 208.


Ecology

Does it really suggest the picture Leopold finds?

(Re)Interpreting the Land Ethic

• Responses. Marietta: good of biotic community the only good? A good? An important good?

• Norton: anthropocentric re-interpretation of Leopold

• Audience of the book



In 1935, there were only 25 nesting pairs of sandhill cranes in Wisconsin.

"The ultimate value in these marshes is wildness, and the crane is wildness incarnate," he wrote. "Some day, perhaps in the very process of our benefactions, perhaps in the fullness of geologic time, the last crane will trumpet his farewell and spiral skyward from the great marsh. High out of the clouds will fall the sound of hunting horns, the baying of the phantom pack, the tinkle of little bells, and then a silence never to be broken, unless perchance in some far pasture of the Milky Way.”

Today there are 12,000 sandhill cranes in Wisconsin.



Documents

Aldo Leopold, 1887-1948 Grew up in Iowa, hiking and hunting with his father, Carl, along Miss. River marshes. Went to Yale, majoring in forestry, then