Part of a series on Aldo Leopold’s “Land Ethic”
Somebody somewhere at this moment is writing a reverential essay about Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic.
I feel a little ungenerous, I admit, to write in less than enthusiastic
tones. It seems to me though that if the land ethic, Leopold’s
extension of the ethical sequence to encompass the land community
(including other creatures) and thereby forming the basis for new
conservation values, was going to work out we’d have stronger hints of
this already. After all, this classic essay in conservation ethics was
published in 1949 and has been the subject of lively interest in the
intervening year. I am familiar with a lot of the literature
surrounding the essay; certainly I know where to find those pieces I
have overlooked in the past. Its influence on the history of
conservation biology cannot be overstated. To illustrate, in A Companion to Environmental Philosophy
(I choose this because it’s here beside me on the desk), the index
records entries for “Land Ethic: biotic community” extending over 7
lines, with 18 separate entries (some of which bracket several pages of
the text). I am interested, however, in reading the essay afresh; a
reading unencumbered by the scholarly paraphernalia available for this
work. I know therefore that the mild critique I offer here and in
future posts have probably been fended off; ably deflected by the
academic phalanx the surrounds Leopold’s work, nevertheless, in the
spirit of inquiring if the land ethic can be rejuvenated I pose some
challenges again. It may be that we must risk deposing this king of
ecology. In other words, I ask if the land ethic must be rescued from Leopold’s
treatment of it? It’s time to read Leopold as if he’s being read for
the first time.
In the essay Leopold gets down to business quickly. He claims ethics on behalf of ecology and evolution, relieving philosophy of its responsibilities in this department. Not atypically, when such acts of disciplinary burgling occur, scientific disciplines replace a remedial understanding of a philosophical precept with an oftentimes vapid translation into the terms of its own discipline. For example, the newer paradigm of biodiversity and ecosystem function (BEF) attempted in the 1980s to supplant traditional justification of conservation action rooted in ethics, before certain limitations of this new BEF viewpoint became apparent. But let’s give this to Leopold for a moment. From an ecological/evolutionary perspective he claims that ethics is “a limitation of action in the struggle for existence”. Note, that this is not just evolutionary theory; it is gratifyingly your granny’s evolutionary theory – a page out of the Darwinian notebook. Quite appropriately he identifies as a central problem in evolution the explanation of social behavior. Stated crudely, if the dynamo of Darwin’s evolutionary mechanism is assessed in increases to individual fitness in the competitive struggle for existence, how can one explain individuals setting aside their interests for the benefit of others (the social contract)?
Leopold does not provide a mechanistic answer, nor, in fact,
does he discuss mechanism in detail; he points to the mere fact of the
emergence of community as something to marvel at: he points to co-operation, to
symbioses and so forth. That is, for his
purposes he needs only establish that an extension of ethics to collectives
beyond the individual is “an evolutionary possibility”. It was, he claimed, an evolutionary
possibility for ethically informed cooperation to replace an original
“free-for-all competition”. Now here we
may have a little hitch – if the extension of ethics which Leopold described as
being “co-operative mechanisms with ethical content” is embedded in
evolutionary theory, is it useful or interesting from an evolutionary
perspective to identify these ethical mechanisms as the agents ushering in the
“advanced symbioses” of politics and economics?
Cultural flexibility may indeed be an evolved characteristic;
nevertheless the claim that we should think about ethics primarily in its
evolutionary rather than its philosophical context is strange since the
extension of ethics to the land community does not present a novel evolutionary
mechanism with implications for the social behavior of organisms other than
humans. The mechanisms may be a
humans-only affair and if this is the case, they might, therefore, be imagined
to benefit from the richer (philosophical) tradition that Leopold was content
to set aside. Could it be that the
insight that Leopold offers us here – that a land ethic is not precluded by
evolution – an insight purchased at the price of a closer philosophical inspection
of the question of ethics is the reason why the land ethic offers us striking
phrases, strong encouragement, and lofty proclamations about the degree to
which all of this is necessary, but no actual path forward? William Jordan III makes this point effectively in his book Sunflower Forest where he also elaborates the point that community, a key word in the development of the land ethic, is easier said than done..
The extension of ethics beyond its primordial glimmerings in
inter-individual relations through those rules that bind an individual to
society, and on ultimately to an ethic dealing with “man’s relation to the
land” is not infeasible from an evolutionary perspective. Sure, this sounds reasonable. However, as I've suggested above it’s a small purchase for the cost
of abandoning philosophically-informed ethical theory. The philosophical definition of ethics that
Leopold subsumes under his ecological-evolutionary one is “a differentiation of
social from anti-social behavior.”
Roughly speaking this is morality.
Though environmental ethics has since rejoined the flock of ethicists
grazing the philosophical mountainside, and draws upon intellectual resources
that go back to the pre-Socratics, Leopold wandered off that mountainside and
for better or worse deprived the land ethic of that mountainy feed.
I would regret being placed in a camp that thought that a
philosophical ethics offers a huge amount in terms of directly creating an
ethical world. But those who want to
create an ethic might, it seems to me, benefit from being edifying by the history
of philosophy on this matter. Leopold
assuredly wanted to create a new ethic.
What would this ethic do? It
would affirm the right of the community of life to a continued existence. To do so, human-kind needs to be unseated as
conqueror and reinstalled as citizen in the land community. This more harmonious relation of man and land
is what, Leopold told us, is meant by conservation. How is this demotion, re-installation and new
harmony to be achieved? Not by education
it seems, but by an “internal change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties,
affections, and convictions.” What will
guide us to this transition? A new
“image of the land” will: a vision of the land as a “biotic mechanism”. In particular this is an ecological vision –
the Eltonian biotic pyramid, food chains and so forth. What ultimately would this change of
emphasis to an ecological vision do for us? It would provide a basis for a
“love, respect and admiration for the land”.
Without these values we will not achieve a land ethic. And, as Leopold affirmed, these values are
not economic ones; he means here “value in the philosophical sense.” Thus, late in the essay, we return to
philosophy. Ecology can inculcate in us
a philosophical appreciation of the
value of the land. How exactly does one
think about philosophical value? Well
for that one might need a philosophy of value, which along with a philosophical
ethic is precisely what Leopold neglected to provide. An investigation of a theory of value that might lead to a more fully developed environmental ethic is being undertaken by an interdisciplinary group to which I belong and is led by William Jordan III.
No comments:
Post a Comment