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Developing the Land Ethic and Ecosystem "Health"

December 15, 2008

Aldo Leopold laid the foundation of the modern concept of the land ethic. His instrumental book ‘A Sand County Almanac’ sought to construct an ethical standard for man’s interaction with nature; a realm which Leopold believed was philosophically undefined. ”There is yet no ethic dealing with man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land… is still property. The land relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations” (374).

Leopold believed that the land ethic was a natural human development which built upon earlier ethics devoted to the relation between individuals, and later to the relation between individuals and society. He asserted that “the extension of ethics to this third element in human environment is… an evolutionary possibility and an ecological necessity” (374). Leopold stressed that human beings are members of a “community of interdependent parts” to which the soils, waters, plants, and animals also belonged (375).

“In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo Sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow members, and also respect for the community as such” (375)

This “respect for the community” was wholly lacking not due to an absence of education, according to Leopold, but because of a fundamental unwillingness to change our frame of reference. He wisely pointed out that “no important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions” (377). Leopold lamented the dearth of “obligations over and above self-interest” and the accompanying failure to practice conservation exclusive from the perceived value of land. Indeed, Leopold would have argued that human beings are incapable of gauging the value of the land in the first place. As part of an infinitely complex community, we’re but a sole organism that must maintain equilibrium with the land in order to ensure our mutual well-being.

J. Baird Callicott is a disciple of Aldo Leopold and one of the preeminent voices advocating a new relationship between humans and our environment. At the center of Callicott’s philosophy is a belief that “objectively good anthropogenic change is change that benefits people and maintains land health” and “objectively bad anthropogenic change is change that results in land sickness or worse in the death of ecosystems” (390). Within the context of a dynamic, changing environment, Callicott affirms that “ecosystem health is a condition of internal order and organization in ecosystems that… is both intrinsically good and objective” (385).

By personifying the land itself with the hitherto human quality of “health”, Callicott creates a defensible criterion for what is and is not admissible behavior in regards to our interaction with nature. Importantly, his stance leaves room for inevitable human development that is wholly accepted; so much as it falls within a context of maintaining the health of the environment. Callicott recognizes the difficulties inherent in defining what is and is not a healthy ecosystem but maintains that science is as capable in this regard as it is in defining a healthy human being.

“The problem for science is to identify objective norms of ecosystem health. Like the medical norms of bodily health, the norms of ecosystem health would be simultaneously descriptive and prescriptive, objective and nomothetic, instrumentally and intrinsically valuable” (386)

Callicott further articulates that the nuts and bolts of what characterizes a healthy ecosystem are outside of the purview of philosophy and instead tasks ecologists with determining “what the general characteristics and indices of ecosystem health might be” (387). Herein lay the immense possibilities of Callicott’s dogma. The fact that the environment is characterized and influenced by varying degrees of health would no longer be in question, and philosophical discourse would give way to scientific reasoning which would shape our synergy with nature.

Like many of his colleagues and predecessors, Holmes Rolston III stresses the importance of ecosystem health as a fundamental tenet of a healthy environment. Irrespective of the component parts, he contends, an ecosystem is “a kind of field with characteristics as vital for life as any property contained within particular organisms” (394). By applying this framework, it becomes evident that our approach towards conservation over the past century has been significantly misguided. Our emphasis on piecemeal protection of species, primarily mega-fauna, has overlooked the importance of broader natural systems that are necessary to ensure the survival of the entire community of organisms. By identifying the “matrix of connections” that encompasses an ecosystem it becomes possible to more fully appreciate that which gives the entire earth its vitality.

More radical than the idea of Leopold’s land ethic is the Deep Ecology Movement (DEM) that traces its roots to the 1970s. This philosophy, largely conceived by Professor Arne Naess, was a response to so-called “shallow ecology”, which was regarded as centrally focused on the “health and affluence of people in the developed countries” (400).  Naess developed a “platform of deep ecology” that laid out eight fundamental principles in the hope of stimulating a “dialogue between supporters of and critics of the DEM” (400). Many of these principles were largely incompatible with the basic assertions of other philosophies, however, including an insistence that “the flourishing of non-human life requires… a substantial decrease of the human population” (401).

The DEM can be considered one end of a spectrum as humanity seeks to define our role within, and responsibility to, the environment. Aldo Leopold’s land ethic and the work that’s been based on this philosophy have largely the foundation for the modern environmental movement. As we broaden our definition of what represents the “land-community”, it’s a prerequisite that humanity will be seen as only one of an endless number of species on the planet. We will no longer be conquerors of the earth but will be seen as protectors of nature’s delicate balance of life. We’ll be seen as special, but equal.

Filed under: Perspectives on the Environment