💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › aldo-leopold-the-land-ethic.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 07:13:52. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: The Land Ethic Author: Aldo Leopold Date: 1949 Language: en Topics: Community, Ecology, Environmentalism, Land, Source: A Sand County Almanac Notes: This essay is excerpted from Aldo Leopold's book A Sand County Almanac.
When god-like Odysseus returned from the wars in Troy, he hanged all on
one rope a dozen slave-girls of his household whom he suspected of
misbehavior during his absence.
This hanging involved no question of propriety. The girls were property.
The disposal of property was then, as now, a matter of expediency, not
of right and wrong.
Concepts of right and wrong were not lacking from Odysseus' Greece:
witness the fidelity of his wife through the long years before at last
his black-prowed galleys clove the wine-dark seas for home. The ethical
structure of that day covered wives, but had not yet been extended to
human chattels. During the three thousand years which have since
elapsed, ethical criteria have been extended to many fields of conduct,
with corresponding shrinkages in those judged by expediency only.
This extension of ethics, so far studied only by philosophers, is
actually a process in ecological evolution. Its sequences may be
described in ecological as well as well as in philosophical terms. An
ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the
struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation
of social from antisocial conduct. These are two definitions of one
thing. The thing has its origin in the tendency of interdependent
individuals or groups to evolve modes of co-operation. The ecologist
calls these symbioses. Politics and economics are advanced symbioses in
which the original free-for-all competition has been replaced, in part,
by co-operative mechanisms with an ethical content.
The complexity of co-operative mechanisms has increased with population
density, and with the efficiency of tools. It was simpler, for example,
to define the anti-social uses of sticks and stones in the days of the
mastodons than of bullets and billboards in the age of motors.
The first ethics dealt with the relation between individuals; the Mosaic
Decalogue is an example. Later accretions dealt with the relation
between the individual and society. The Golden Rule tries to integrate
the individual to society; democracy to integrate social organization to
the individual.
There is as yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the
animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus' slave-girls,
is still property. The land-relation is still strictly economic,
entailing privileges but not obligations.
The extension of ethics to this third element in human environment is,
if I read the evidence correctly, an evolutionary possibility and an
ecological necessity. It is the third step in a sequence. The first two
have already been taken. Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel
and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of land is not only
inexpedient but wrong. Society, however, has not yet affirmed their
belief. I regard the present conservation movement as the embryo of such
an affirmation.
An ethic may be regarded as a mode of guidance for meeting ecological
situations so new or intricate, or involving such deferred reactions,
that the path of social expediency is not discernible to the average
individual. Animal instincts are modes of guidance for the individual in
meeting such situations. Ethics are possibly a kind of community
instinct in-the-making.
All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise that the individual
is a member of a community of interdependent parts. His instincts prompt
him to compete for his place in that community, but his ethics prompt
him also to co-operate (perhaps in order that there may be a place to
compete for).
The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to
include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.
This sounds simple: do we not already sing our love for and obligation
to the land of the free and the home of the brave? Yes, but just what
and whom do we love? Certainly not the soil, which we are sending
helter-skelter down river. Certainly not the waters, which we assume
have no function except to turn turbines, float barges, and carry off
sewage. Certainly not the plants, of which we exterminate whole
communities without batting an eye. Certainly not the animals, of which
we have already extirpated many of the largest and most beautiful
species. A land ethic of course cannot prevent the alteration,
management, and use of these 'resources,' but it does affirm their right
to continued existence, and, at least in spots, their continued
existence in a natural state.
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.
In human history, we have learned (I hope) that the conqueror role is
eventually self-defeating. Why? Because it is implicit in such a role
that the conqueror knows, ex cathedra, just what makes the community
clock tick, and just what and who is valuable, and what and who is
worthless, in community life. It always turns out that he knows neither,
and this is why his conquests eventually defeat themselves.
In the biotic community, a parallel situation exists. 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 the degree of our education.
The ordinary citizen today assumes that science knows what makes the
community clock tick; the scientist is equally sure that he does not. He
knows that the biotic mechanism is so complex that its workings may
never be fully understood.
That man is, in fact, only a member of a biotic team is shown by an
ecological interpretation of history. Many historical events, hitherto
explained solely in terms of human enterprise, were actually biotic,
interactions between people and land. The characteristics of the land
determined the facts quite as potently as the characteristics of the men
who lived on it.
Consider, for example, the settlement of the Mississippi valley. In the
years following the Revolution, three groups were contending for its
control: the native Indian, the French and English traders, and the
American settlers. Historians wonder what would have happened if the
English at Detroit had thrown a little more weight into the Indian side
of those tipsy scales which decided the outcome of the colonial
migration into the canelands of Kentucky. It is time now to ponder the
fact that the cane-lands, when subjected to the particular mixture of
forces represented by the cow, plow, fire, and axe of the pioneer,
became bluegrass. What if the plant succession inherent in this dark and
bloody ground had, under the impact of these forces, given us some
worthless sedge, shrub, or weed? Would Boone and Kenton have held out?
Would there have been any overflow into Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and
Missouri? Any Louisiana Purchase? Any transcontinental union of new
states? Any Civil War?
Kentucky was one sentence in the drama of history. We are commonly told
what the human actors in this drama tried to do, but we are seldom told
that their success, or the lack of it, hung in large degree on the
reaction of particular soils to the impact of the particular forces
exerted by their occupancy. In the case of Kentucky, we do not even know
where the bluegrass came from -- whether it is a native species, or a
stowaway from Europe.
Contrast the cane-lands with what hindsight tells us about the
Southwest, where the pioneers were equally brave, resourceful, and
persevering. The impact of occupancy here brought no bluegrass, or other
plant fitted to withstand the bumps and buffetings of hard use. This
region, when grazed by livestock, reverted through a series of more and
more worthless grasses, shrubs, and weeds to a condition of unstable
equilibrium. Each recession of plant types bred erosion; each increment
to erosion bred a further recession of plants. The result today is a
progressive and mutual deterioration, not only of plants and soils, but
of the animal community subsisting thereon. The early settlers did not
expect this: on the ciénegas of New Mexico some even cut ditches to
hasten it. So subtle has been its progress that few residents of the
region are aware of it. It is quite invisible to the tourist who finds
this wrecked landscape colorful and charming (as indeed it is, but it
bears scant resemblance to what it was in 1848).
This same landscape was 'developed' once before, but with quite
different results. The Pueblo Indians settled the Southwest in
pre-Columbian times, but they happened not to be equipped with range
livestock. Their civilization expired, but not because their land
expired.
In India, regions devoid of any sod-forming grass have been settled,
apparently without wrecking the land, by the simple expedient of
carrying the grass to the cow, rather than vice versa. (Was this the
result of some deep wisdom, or was it just good luck? I do not know.)
In short, the plant succession steered the course of history; the
pioneer simply demonstrated, for good or ill, what successions inhered
in the land. Is history taught in this spirit? It will be, once the
concept of land as a community really penetrates our intellectual life.
Conservation is a state of harmony between man and land. Despite nearly
a century of propaganda, conservation still proceeds at a snail's pace;
progress still consists largely of letterhead pieties and convention
oratory. On the back forty we still slip two steps backward for each
forward stride.
The usual answer to this dilemma is 'more conservation education.' No
one will debate this, but is it certain that only the volume of
education needs stepping up? Is something lacking in the content as
well?
It is difficult to give a fair summary of its content in brief form,
but, as I understand it, the content is substantially this: obey the
law, vote right, join some organizations, and practice what conservation
is profitable on your own land; the government will do the rest.
Is not this formula too easy to accomplish anything worth-while? It
defines no right or wrong, assigns no obligation, calls for no
sacrifice, implies no change in the current philosophy of values. In
respect of land use, it urges only enlightened self-interest. Just how
far will such education take us? An example will perhaps yield a partial
answer.
By 1930 it had become clear to all except the ecologically blind that
southwestern Wisconsin's topsoil was slipping seaward. In 1933 the
farmers were told that if they would adopt certain remedial practices
for five years, the public would donate CCC labor to install them, plus
the necessary machinery and materials. The offer was widely accepted,
but the practices were widely forgotten when the five-year contract
period was up. The farmers continued only those practices that yielded
an immediate and visible economic gain for themselves.
This led to the idea that maybe farmers would learn more quickly if they
themselves wrote the rules. Accordingly the Wisconsin Legislature in
1937 passed the Soil Conservation District Law. This said to farmers, in
effect: We, the public, will furnish you free technical service and loan
you specialized machines, if you will write your own rules for land-use.
Each county may write its own rules, and these will have the force of
law. Nearly all the counties promptly organized to accept the proffered
help, but after a decade of operation, no county has yet written a
single rule. There has been visible progress in such practices as
strip-cropping, pasture renovation, and soil liming, but none in fencing
woodlots against grazing, and none in excluding plow and cow from steep
slopes. The farmers, in short, have selected those remedial practices
which were profitable anyhow, and ignored those which were profitable to
the community, but not clearly profitable to themselves.
When one asks why no rules have been written, one is told that the
community is not yet ready to support them; education must precede
rules. But the education actually in progress makes no mention of
obligations to land over and above those dictated by self-interest. The
net result is that we have more education but less soil, fewer healthy
woods, and as many floods as in 1937.
The puzzling aspect of such situations is that the existence of
obligations over and above self-interest is taken for granted in such
rural community enterprises as the betterment of roads, schools,
churches, and baseball teams. Their existence is not taken for granted,
nor as yet seriously discussed, in bettering the behavior of the water
that falls on the land, or in the preserving of the beauty or diversity
of the farm landscape. Land use ethics are still governed wholly by
economic self-interest, just as social ethics were a century ago.
To sum up: we asked the farmer to do what he conveniently could to save
his soil, and he has done just that, and only that. The farmer who
clears the woods off a 75 per cent slope, turns his cows into the
clearing, and dumps its rainfall, rocks, and soil into the community
creek, is still (if otherwise decent) a respected member of society. If
he puts lime on his fields and plants his crops on contour, he is still
entitled to all the privileges and emoluments of his Soil Conservation
District. The District is a beautiful piece of social machinery, but it
is coughing along on two cylinders because we have been too timid, and
too anxious for quick success, to tell the farmer the true magnitude of
his obligations. Obligations have no meaning without conscience, and the
problem we face is the extension of the social conscience from people to
land.
No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal
change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and
convictions. The proof that conservation has not yet touched these
foundations of conduct lies in the fact that philosophy and religion
have not yet heard of it. In our attempt to make conservation easy, we
have made it trivial.
When the logic of history hungers for bread and we hand out a stone, we
are at pains to explain how much the stone resembles bread. I now
describe some of the stones which serve in lieu of a land ethic.
One basic weakness in a conservation system based wholly on economic
motives is that most members of the land community have no economic
value. Wildflowers and songbirds are examples. Of the 22,000 higher
plants and animals native to Wisconsin, it is doubtful whether more than
5 per cent can be sold, fed, eaten, or otherwise put to economic use.
Yet these creatures are members of the biotic community, and if (as I
believe) its stability depends on its integrity, they are entitled to
continuance.
When one of these non-economic categories is threatened, and if we
happen to love it, we invent subterfuges to give it economic importance.
At the beginning of the century songbirds were supposed to be
disappearing. Ornithologists jumped to the rescue with some distinctly
shaky evidence to the effect that insects would eat us up if birds
failed to control them. The evidence had to be economic in order to be
valid.
It is painful to read these circumlocutions today. We have no land ethic
yet, but we have at least drawn nearer the point of admitting that birds
should continue as a matter of biotic right, regardless of the presence
or absence of economic advantage to us.
A parallel situation exists in respect of predatory mammals, raptoral
birds, and fish-eating birds. Time was when biologists somewhat
overworked the evidence that these creatures preserve the health of game
by killing weaklings, or that they control rodents for the farmer, or
that they prey only on 'worthless' species. Here again, the evidence had
to be economic in order to be valid. It is only in recent years that we
hear the more honest argument that predators are members of the
community, and that no special interest has the right to exterminate
them for the sake of a benefit, real or fancied, to itself.
Unfortunately this enlightened view is still in the talk stage. In the
field the extermination of predators goes merrily on: witness the
impending erasure of the timber wolf by fiat of Congress, the
Conservation Bureaus, and many state legislatures.
Some species of trees have been 'read out of the party' by
economics-minded foresters because they grow too slowly, or have too low
a sale value to pay as timber crops: white cedar, tamarack, cypress,
beech, and hemlock are examples. In Europe, where forestry is
ecologically more advanced, the non-commercial tree species are
recognized as members of the native forest community, to be preserved as
such, within reason. Moreover some (like beech) have been found to have
a valuable function in building up soil fertility. The interdependence
of the forest and its constituent tree species, ground flora, and fauna
is taken for granted.
Lack of economic value is sometimes a character not only of species or
groups, but of entire biotic communities: marshes, bogs, dunes, and
'deserts' are examples. Our formula in such cases is to relegate their
conservation to government as refuges, monuments, or parks. The
difficulty is that these communities are usually interspersed with more
valuable private lands; the government cannot possibly own or control
such scattered parcels. The net effect is that we have relegated some of
them to ultimate extinction over large areas. If the private owner were
ecologically minded, he would be proud to be the custodian of a
reasonable proportion of such areas, which add diversity and beauty to
his farm and to his community.
In some instances, the assumed lack of profit in these 'waste' areas has
proved to be wrong, but only after most of them had been done away with.
The present scramble to re-flood muskrat marshes is a case in point.
There is a clear tendency in American conservation to relegate to
government all necessary jobs that private landowners fail to perform.
Government ownership, operation, subsidy, or regulation is now widely
prevalent in forestry, range management, soil and watershed management,
park and wilderness conservation, fisheries management, and migratory
bird management, with more to come. Most of this growth in governmental
conservation is proper and logical, some of it is inevitable. That I
imply no disapproval of it is implicit in the fact that I have spent
most of my life working for it. Nevertheless the question arises: What
is the ultimate magnitude of the enterprise? Will the tax base carry its
eventual ramifications? At what point will governmental conservation,
like the mastodon, become handicapped by its own dimensions? The answer,
if there is any, seems to be in a land ethic, or some other force which
assigns more obligation to the private landowner.
Industrial landowners and users, especially lumbermen and stockmen, are
inclined to wail long and loudly about the extension of government
ownership and regulation to land, but (with notable exceptions) they
show little disposition to develop the only visible alternative: the
voluntary practice of conservation on their own lands.
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. The overwhelming growth of land-use subsidies in recent years
must be ascribed, in large part, to the government's own agencies for
conservation education: the land bureaus, the agricultural colleges, and
the extension services. As far as I can detect, no ethical obligation
toward land is taught in these institutions.
To sum up: 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 situations.
An ethic to supplement and guide the economic relation to land
presupposes the existence of some mental image of land as a biotic
mechanism. We can be ethical only in relation to something we can see,
feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.
The image commonly employed in conservation education is 'the balance of
nature.' For reasons too lengthy to detail here, this figure of speech
fails to describe accurately what little we know about the land
mechanism. A much truer image is the one employed in ecology: the biotic
pyramid. I shall first sketch the pyramid as a symbol of land, and later
develop some of its implications in terms of land-use.
Plants absorb energy from the sun. This energy flows through a circuit
called the biota, which may be represented by a pyramid consisting of
layers. The bottom layer is the soil. A plant layer rests on the soil,
an insect layer on the plants, a bird and rodent layer on the insects,
and so on up through various animal groups to the apex layer, which
consists of the large carnivores.
The species of a layer are alike not in where they came from, or in what
they look like, but rather in what they eat. Each successive layer
depends on those below it for food and often for other services, and
each in turn furnishes food and services to those above. Proceeding
upward, each successive layer decreases in numerical abundance. Thus,
for every carnivore there are hundreds of his prey, thousands of their
prey, millions of insects, uncountable plants. The pyramidal form of the
system reflects this numerical progression from apex to base. Man shares
an intermediate layer with the bears, raccoons, and squirrels which eat
both meat and vegetables.
The lines of dependency for food and other services are called food
chains. Thus soil-oak-deer-Indian is a chain that has now been largely
converted to 'soil-corn-cowfarmer.' Each species, including ourselves,
is a link in many chains. The deer eats a hundred plants other than oak,
and the cow a hundred plants other than corn. Both, then, are links in a
hundred chains. The pyramid is a tangle of chains so complex as to seem
disorderly, yet the stability of the system proves it to be a highly
organized structure. Its functioning depends on the co-operation and
competition of its diverse parts.
In the beginning, the pyramid of life was low and squat; the food chains
short and simple. Evolution has added layer after layer, link after
link. Man is one of thousands of accretions to the height and complexity
of the pyramid. Science has given us many doubts, but it has given us at
least one certainty: the trend of evolution is to elaborate and
diversify the biota.
Land, then, is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing
through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals. Food chains are the
living channels which conduct energy upward; death and decay return it
to the soil. The circuit is not closed; some energy is dissipated in
decay, some is added by absorption from the air, some is stored in
soils, peats, and long-lived forests; but it is a sustained circuit,
like a slowly augmented revolving fund of life. There is always a net
loss by downhill wash, but this is normally small and offset by the
decay of rocks. It is deposited in the ocean and, in the course of
geological time, raised to form new lands and new pyramids.
The velocity and character of the upward flow of energy depend on the
complex structure of the plant and animal community, much as the upward
flow of sap in a tree depends on its complex cellular organization.
Without this complexity, normal circulation would presumably not occur.
Structure means the characteristic numbers, as well as the
characteristic kinds and functions, of the component species. This
interdependence between the complex structure of the land and its smooth
functioning as an energy unit is one of its basic attributes.
When a change occurs in one part of the circuit, many other parts must
adjust themselves to it. Change does not necessarily obstruct or divert
the flow of energy; evolution is a long series of self-induced changes,
the net result of which has been to elaborate the flow mechanism and to
lengthen the circuit. Evolutionary changes, however, are usually slow
and local. Man' s invention of tools has enabled him to make changes of
unprecedented violence, rapidity, and scope.
One change is in the composition of floras and faunas. The larger
predators are lopped off the apex of the pyramid; food chains, for the
first time in history, become shorter rather than longer. Domesticated
species from other lands are substituted for wild ones, and wild ones
are moved to new habitats. In this world-wide pooling of faunas and
floras, some species get out of bounds as pests and diseases, others are
extinguished. Such effects are seldom intended or foreseen; they
represent unpredicted and often untraceable readjustments in the
structure. Agricultural science is largely a race between the emergence
of new pests and the emergence of new techniques for their control.
Another change touches the flow of energy through plants and animals and
its return to the soil. Fertility is the ability of soil to receive,
store, and release energy. Agriculture, by overdrafts on the soil, or by
too radical a substitution of domestic for native species in the
superstructure, may derange the channels of flow or deplete storage.
Soils depleted of their storage, or of the organic matter which anchors
it, wash away faster than they form. This is erosion.
Waters, like soil, are part of the energy circuit. Industry, by
polluting waters or obstructing them with dams, may exclude the plants
and animals necessary to keep energy in circulation.
Transportation brings about another basic change: the plants or animals
grown in one region are now consumed and returned to the soil in
another. Transportation taps the energy stored in rocks, and in the air,
and uses it elsewhere; thus we fertilize the garden with nitrogen
gleaned by the guano birds from the fishes of seas on the other side of
the Equator. Thus the formerly localized and self-contained circuits are
pooled on a worldwide scale.
The process of altering the pyramid for human occupation releases stored
energy, and this often gives rise, during the pioneering period, to a
deceptive exuberance of plant and animal life, both wild and tame. These
releases of biotic capital tend to becloud or postpone the penalties of
violence.
This thumbnail sketch of land as an energy circuit conveys three basic
ideas:
(1) That land is not merely soil.
(2) That the native plants and animals kept the energy circuit open;
others may or may not.
(3) That man-made changes are of a different order than evolutionary
changes, and have effects more comprehensive than is intended or
foreseen.
These ideas, collectively, raise two basic issues: Can the land adjust
itself to the new order? Can the desired alterations be accomplished
with less violence?
Biotas seem to differ in their capacity to sustain violent conversion.
Western Europe, for example, carries a far different pyramid than Caesar
found there. Some large animals are lost; swampy forests have become
meadows or plowland; many new plants and animals are introduced, some of
which escape as pests; the remaining natives are greatly changed in
distribution and abundance. Yet the soil is still there and, with the
help of imported nutrients, still fertile; the waters flow normally; the
new structure seems to function and to persist. There is no visible
stoppage or derangement of the circuit.
Western Europe, then, has a resistant biota. Its inner processes are
tough, elastic, resistant to strain. No matter how violent the
alterations, the pyramid, so far, has developed some new modus vivendi
which preserves its habitability for man, and for most of the other
natives.
Japan seems to present another instance of radical conversion without
disorganization.
Most other civilized regions, and some as yet barely touched by
civilization, display various stages of disorganization, varying from
initial symptoms to advanced wastage. In Asia Minor and North Africa
diagnosis is confused by climatic changes, which may have been either
the cause or the effect of advanced wastage. In the United States the
degree of disorganization varies locally; it is worst in the Southwest,
the Ozarks, and parts of the South, and least in New England and the
Northwest. Better land-uses may still arrest it in the less advanced
regions. In parts of Mexico, South America, South Africa, and Australia
a violent and accelerating wastage is in progress, but I cannot assess
the prospects.
This almost world-wide display of disorganization in the land seems to
be similar to disease in an animal, except that it never culminates in
complete disorganization or death. The land recovers, but at some
reduced level of complexity, and with a reduced carrying capacity for
people, plants, and animals. Many biotas currently regarded as 'lands of
opportunity' are in fact already subsisting on exploitative agriculture,
i.e., they have already exceeded their sustained carrying capacity. Most
of South America is overpopulated in this sense.
In arid regions we attempt to offset the process of wastage by
reclamation, but it is only too evident that the prospective longevity
of reclamation projects is often short. In our own West, the best of
them may not last a century.
The combined evidence of history and ecology seems to support one
general deduction: the less violent the man-made changes, the greater
the probability of successful readjustment in the pyramid. Violence, in
turn, varies with human population density; a dense population requires
a more violent conversion. In this respect, North America has a better
chance for permanence than Europe, if she can contrive to limit her
density.
This deduction runs counter to our current philosophy, which assumes
that because a small increase in density enriched human life, that an
indefinite increase will enrich it indefinitely. Ecology knows of no
density relationship that holds for indefinitely wide limits. All gains
from density are subject to a law of diminishing returns.
Whatever may be the equation for men and land, it is improbable that we
as yet know all its terms. Recent discoveries in mineral and vitamin
nutrition reveal unsuspected dependencies in the up-circuit: incredibly
minute quantities of certain substances determine the value of soils to
plants, of plants to animals. What of the down-circuit? What of the
vanishing species, the preservation of which we now regard as an
esthetic luxury? They helped build the soil; in what unsuspected ways
may they be essential to its maintenance? Professor Weaver proposes that
we use prairie flowers to reflocculate the wasting soils of the dust
bowl; who knows for what purpose cranes and condors, otters and
grizzlies may some day be used?
A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience,
and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for
the health of the land. Health is the capacity of the land for
self-renewal. Conservation is our effort to understand and preserve this
capacity.
Conservationists are notorious for their dissensions. Superficially
these seem to add up to mere confusion, but a more careful scrutiny
reveals a single plane of cleavage common to many specialized fields. In
each field one group (A) regards the land as soil, and its function as
commodity-production; another group (B) regards the land as a biota, and
its function as something broader. How much broader is admittedly in a
state of doubt and confusion.
In my own field, forestry, group A is quite content to grow trees like
cabbages, with cellulose as the basic forest commodity. It feels no
inhibition against violence; its ideology is agronomic. Group B. on the
other hand, sees forestry as fundamentally different from agronomy
because it employs natural species, and manages a natural environment
rather than creating an artificial one. Group B prefers natural
reproduction on principle. It worries on biotic as well as economic
grounds about the loss of species like chestnut, and the threatened loss
of the white pines. It worries about whole series of secondary forest
functions: wildlife, recreation, watersheds, wilderness areas. To my
mind, Group B feels the stirrings of an ecological conscience.
In the wildlife field, a parallel cleavage exists. For Group A the basic
commodities are sport and meat; the yardstick of production are ciphers
of take in pheasants and trout. Artificial propagation is acceptable as
a permanent as well as a temporary recourse -- if its unit costs permit.
Group B on the other hand, worries about a whole series of biotic
side-issues. What is the cost in predators of producing a game crop?
Should we have further recourse to exotics? How can management restore
the shrinking species, like prairie grouse, already hopeless as
shootable game? How can management restore the threatened rarities, like
trumpeter swan and whooping crane? Can management principles be extended
to wildflowers? Here again it is clear to me that we have the same A-B
cleavage as in forestry.
In the larger field of agriculture I am less competent to speak, but
there seem to be somewhat parallel cleavages. Scientific agriculture was
actively developing before ecology was born, hence a slower penetration
of ecological concepts might be expected. Moreover the farmer, by the
very nature of his techniques, must modify the biota more radically than
the forester or the wildlife manager. Nevertheless, there are many
discontents in agriculture which seem to add up to a new vision of
'biotic farming.'
Perhaps the most important of these is the new evidence that poundage or
tonnage is no measure of the food-value of farm crops; the products of
fertile soil may be qualitatively as well as quantitatively superior. We
can bolster poundage from depleted soils by pouring on imported
fertility, but we are not necessarily bolstering food-value. The
possible ultimate ramifications of this idea are so immense that I must
leave their exposition to abler pens.
The discontent that labels itself 'organic farming,' while bearing some
of the earmarks of a cult, is nevertheless biotic in its direction,
particularly in its insistence on the importance of soil flora and
fauna.
The ecological fundamentals of agriculture are just as poorly known to
the public as in other fields of land-use. For example, few educated
people realize that the marvelous advances in technique made during
recent decades are improvements in the pump, rather than the well. Acre
for acre, they have barely sufficed to offset the sinking level of
fertility.
In all of these cleavages, we see repeated the same basic paradoxes: man
the conqueror versus man the biotic citizen; science the sharpener of
his sword versus science the search-light on his universe; land the
slave and servant versus land the collective organism. Robinson's
injunction to Tristram may well be applied, at this juncture, to Homo
sapiens as species in geological time:
It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist
without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for
its value. By value, of course, I mean something far broader than mere
economic value; I mean value in the philosophical sense.
Perhaps the most serious obstacle impeding the evolution of a land ethic
is the fact that our educational and economic system is headed away
from, rather than toward, an intense consciousness of land. Your true
modern is separated from the land by many middlemen, and by innumerable
physical gadgets. He has no vital relation to it; to him it is the space
between cities on which crops grow. Turn him loose for a day on the
land, and if the spot does not happen to be a golf links or a 'scenic'
area, he is bored stiff. If crops could be raised by hydroponics instead
of farming, it would suit him very well. Synthetic substitutes for wood,
leather, wool, and other natural land products suit him better than the
originals. In short, land is something he has 'outgrown.'
Almost equally serious as an obstacle to a land ethic is the attitude of
the farmer for whom the land is still an adversary, or a taskmaster that
keeps him in slavery. Theoretically, the mechanization of farming ought
to cut the farmer' s chains, but whether it really does is debatable.
One of the requisites for an ecological comprehension of land is an
understanding of ecology, and this is by no means coextensive with
'education'; in fact, much higher education seems deliberately to avoid
ecological concepts. An understanding of ecology does not necessarily
originate in courses bearing ecological labels; it is quite as likely to
be labeled geography, botany, agronomy, history, or economics. This is
as it should be, but whatever the label, ecological training is scarce.
The case for a land ethic would appear hopeless but for the minority
which is in obvious revolt against these 'modern' trends.
The 'key-log' which must be moved to release the evolutionary process
for an ethic is simply this: quit thinking about decent land-use as
solely an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is
ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically
expedient. 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.
It of course goes without saying that economic feasibility limits the
tether of what can or cannot be done for land. It always has and it
always will. The fallacy the economic determinists have tied around our
collective neck, and which we now need to cast off, is the belief that
economics determines all land use. This is simply not true. An
innumerable host of actions and attitudes, comprising perhaps the bulk
of all land relations, is determined by the land-users' tastes and
predilections, rather than by his purse. The bulk of all land relations
hinges on investments of time, forethought, skill, and faith rather than
on investments of cash. As a land-user thinketh, so is he.
I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social
evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever 'written.'
Only the most superficial student of history supposes that Moses 'wrote'
the Decalogue; it evolved in the minds of a thinking community, and
Moses wrote a tentative summary of it for a 'seminar.' I say tentative
because evolution never stops.
The evolution of a land ethic is an intellectual as well as emotional
process. Conservation is paved with good intentions which prove to be
futile, or even dangerous, because they are devoid of critical
understanding either of the land, or of economic land-use. I think it is
a truism that as the ethical frontier advances from the individual to
the community, its intellectual content increases.
The mechanism of operation is the same for any ethic: social approbation
for right actions: social disapproval for wrong actions.
By and large, our present problem is one of attitudes and implements. We
are remodeling the Alhambra with a steam-shovel, and we are proud of our
yardage. We shall hardly relinquish the shovel, which after all has many
good points, but we are in need of gentler and more objective criteria
for its successful use.