A
few months ago I wrote a fairly critical account of Aldo Leopold’s Land
Ethic. To restate my contention from my
original post: If the land ethic was going to work as formulated in the 1940s
we’d probably know about it by now.
Eric Daryl
Meyer recently responded with some comments on my post and with some additional
comments on Leopold’s essay (see here). I'll
respond to Eric at greater length soon: perhaps one of the metrics of the significance of
Leopold's essay is that, even when one thinks one knows it, it is nevertheless
worth revisiting before one writes about it in detail. But for now a few initial comments.
Eric
wrote that I overstated the disjunction that Leopold makes between philosophical
and ecological ethics. This may be the
case – Leopold’s writing is a little muddy on this point. That is, he claims that it’s the “extension”
of ethics that has so far only been studied by philosophers. Therefore an
ecological account of this extension is what’s needed – a geological accretion
of sorts. Therefore, Leopold was not
taking on ethics in its entirety – just the more focused question of how one
gives to the land that which we already, in theory, grant to one another, that
is, ethical consideration. However, it
is pretty clear that in attempting to reconcile a philosophical definition of
ethics with an ecological one he splits the difference in favor of the
ecological. To be clear, I don’t think that
Leopold is making philosophy and ecology disjunct: he is rather conflating them
and saying that if we solve, so to speak, the equation for the “x” of
evolutionary ecology, we also get the “y” of philosophical ethics. That is for
Leopold x=y. With this the resources of
philosophy, which might be a very useful partner in developing the land ethic, get brushed aside.
Now,
it may simply be the case that Leopold has no particular interest in the deliberations
of let’s say the past couple of millennia of philosophy on the question of
ethics. That’s fine – pessimism on the
question of how philosophy will help us in the matter of an ethical extension to
the land community may be reasonable. But it doesn’t seem to me that we get an
awful lot from Leopold's speculation about social evolution or from Eltonian ecology
either. (That being said, he does
anticipate several issues that became important in ecology only decades after
the land ethic.)
It’s
with all of this is mind that I said we need to save the Land Ethic from
Leopold’s particular account of it. In
my original post I noted that there has been a lot of work on the land ethic in
the past decades –work that often supplements precisely what Leopold sets aside. I had invited my readers to set this aside
for the time being so that we could get back to Leopold’s essay in our efforts to finally get past it. Perhaps this was not an especially helpful
suggestion. That being said, in some
ways it seems to me that this is what Eric does in his short but interesting
post. I say this not to be agreeable,
but because I think the approach, Eric’s approach, hints at some paths forward.
An
example: Eric helps out Leopold by saying that he didn’t really mean “to extend”
ethics but rather that he wanted to put philosophical ethical considerations back
in their deeper ecological context. Now
to maintain this one has to discount some of what Leopold says – he seemed to
mean extend in a pretty concrete way. In
fact, helpful diagrams of the development of ethics depicting the Leopoldian extension
abound. Both Leopold and his interpreters see it in these terms. Therefore Eric’s rereading of this get’s
beyond Leopold in a fairly provocative manner.
Eric
says that once we put ethics in their ecological context then we may get “human
beings to recognize their already-situatedness in relations to living and
non-living beings…” That is, we will have a new understanding of ourselves. Perhaps;
certainly it seems necessary. But as Eric
notes (concurring with me) we are left with no idea about the means by which
this comes about. To push for a “framework in which it is feasible for people
to…self identify as citizens…of the ecological community…” is simply to hope
for the same think that Leopold hoped for.
I regard this as useful, however, because Eric concludes as I do that
one needs to clear away, or at the very least reinterpret, a lot of the work in Leopold’s essay to get to its
useful core. In other words the land
ethic needs to be rescued from Leopold’s treatment of it.
[An essay by William Jordan II with contributions of the "values group" on the value theory that I alluded to in the original post will appear in Environmental Ethics later this year. Also, I briefly, very briefly, comment on Leopold and the Balance of Nature in this recent post at
3Quarksdaily]
