As a hunter, Leopold appreciated man’s place in the landscape, but as the west’s predators were exterminated, and its soils were beaten into eroding submission, Leopold recognized the importance of wilderness, set aside and protected for the people but also from the people. Moreover, he drew connections between the land, specifically the west, and the nature of Americans as a people. He believed that who we are as Americans was forged by the land itself, and to destroy the land would be to destroy our own creator (Callicott & Nelson 78). In 1922 Leopold wrote a plan that set aside wilderness for the benefit of the ecosystem and also for future generations. Two years later the Gila National Forest was created under his guidance in New Mexico. The area was the first of its kind, dedicated to the preservation of the land and its living creatures forever (Frese 104). His vision for a series of protected wilderness areas across the United States was realized after his death in 1964 with the Wilderness Act. The federal government now protects 702 wilderness areas and just under 708 million acres.

After years in the service of the federal government, Leopold emerged from the field philosophically a very different man (Frese 103). In 1924 he accepted a desk job in Madison Wisconsin, where he worked for a number of years before leaving the Forest Service altogether and going to work for the University of Wisconsin. Outside Madison Leopold bought a run-down Sauk County farm with a single manure-filled chicken coop and nursed the land back to health. Much of his influential book A Sand County Almanac was set and written there. After a long life studying the land, Leopold sized the opportunity to put his ideas into practice. With his wife and five children, he attempted to revive the land from years of abuse and live as an integral part of an intact ecosystem. He planted native plants (as many as 3,000 pine trees per year) and hung houses for wood ducks and screech owls. He continued to hunt and found that when he cared for the land, the land cared for him. Living with the land, rather than against it, he saw that people could be a part of what Charles Elton called the “biotic community” and extending human ethics to the land was a key part of this process. From his years in the southwest and his experiences on his farm, Leopold distilled the land ethic, and idea that would gain, rather than lose momentum over time. Aldo Leopold died of a heart attack in 1948 while helping a neighbor fight a brush fire (Opheim 4).


Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, a product of a long life lived with nature, was as much a philosophy as it was a pragmatic approach. With just a handful of environmental philosophers to draw inspiration from, and even fewer with roots in balancing the challenges of the average person with the needs of the natural world, Leopold synthesize a philosophy that resonated with many people from all walks of life. Drawing on experiences as diverse as hunting for pleasure and predator control, heavily managing land as an employee of the Forest Service, rehabilitating a run-down farm in Wisconsin, as well as a lifetime of observation and experience in the natural world, Leoplold’s “rational for wilderness protection was more than scenic or recreational; it was scientific, economic, political, and aesthetic” (Bradley 1). He believed that humans need to view themselves as members of a community, not just of people, but of plants and animals: the biotic community. While he advocated using the land for farming, hunting, and fishing, he also realized that the health of the land was increasingly dependant on man’s stewardship and if supported by humans, would return the favor. This protection extended not just those species useful to humans, but also to those of no direct value (Bradley 1). These creatures, in addition to their intrinsic right to life, support a food chain that eventually does benefit humans. For this reason he was both an anthropocentrist and an ececenterist, believing that the land can and should be used and modified for the use of people, but also that the health of the whole should be considered as it affects all living things. More than 60 years after his death, few would argue that Leopold’s land ethic did not change the face of conservation and environmental ethics and to a large extent, shape the movement’s future (Scoville 58).

While Leopold’s land ethic was truly revolutionary, he was significantly influenced by many of his peers as well as the history of ethical and ecological thought that had come before him. From Charles Darwin he borrowed the notion that the human animal cannot exist without a social ethical framework (Callicott 178). “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 the community, but his ethics prompt him also to co-operate (perhaps in order that there may be a place to compete for)” (Leopold 239). Charles Elton was a contemporary of Leopold’s, and pioneered the concept of the biotic community in his 1927 book Animal Ecology. Elton was one of the first to recognize the importance of the relationships and food chains that unite living creatures in nature (Callicott 178). Leopold modified Elton’s notion of the biotic community to include humans and extended human ethics to the land, thus forming the foundation of the land ethic. Leopold bucked traditional thinking by considering the parts of the land that were not of any direct economic importance, such as soil organism, woodland birds and small native plants. Leopold, like Elton contended that food chains evolved to work together and the health of the ecosystem depends on them remaining together (Starkey 151). He viewed life and death as practically meaningless in nature and considered the relationships, or food chains to be the key to a healthy biotic community. In this world deer are victims of wolf control (Scoville 67) since they inevitably die off when wolves are removed from the ecosystem.

Leopold’s land ethic was also formed by the polarized forces of John Muir, a staunch believer in preserving nature for its own sake, and Gifford Pinchot, the newly appointed director of the Forest Service and proponent of “wise use.” While Pinchot did create much of the massive network of National Forests we have today, his effort would have undoubtedly been thwarted by congress if not for the land’s economic potential (McKibben 172). Pinchot valued nature but only as it positively impacted humans. While Muir and Pinchot butted head, Leopold found both views impractical and exclusive and drifted to the middle of the argument, developing a “Muir-like appreciation of nature and a Pinchot-like intent to use nature wisely” (Meine 78).

While developing his land ethic, Leopold became fascinated by the evolution of ethics over time. After assimilating and modifying Darwin’s ideas, Leopold developed a historical progression of ethics in humans that occurred in three phases. The first phase involved the need for ethics between individual people and small groups during the early years of human evolution. As world populations grew a second phase of ethics ware needed to govern conduct within entire societies. The final, and yet unrealized phase involves the inclusion of the natural world into the human ethical sphere (Starkey 151). To an animal, even a human one, ethics are “a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence” (Leopold 238). But to a species such as ours, that have invented tool that enables us “to make changes of unprecedented violence, rapidity, and scope” (Leopold 254), an ethic that includes all living things is crucial step in our ethical evolution and ultimate survival.

As much as Leopold has been hailed as a visionary, he has also been criticized for disregarding human rights and for failing to propose an economic alternative to our current resource based system. The land ethic assumes that people are no more or less valuable than any other part of the biotic whole, which conflicts fundamentally with human rights. Regan, an animal rights philosopher, called the land ethic “environmental fascism” (361) for its assertion that when humans disrupt the natural cycles of the earth, they should be subject to the same checks and balances as the rest of the biotic community. But to Leopold, human rights should be no more valuable than deer or owl ethics. While the conduct of every living thing in nature is ruled by instinct and evolutionary tradition, humans have evolved the unique ability to make their own choices independent of our specific evolution. “Ethics are possibly a kind of community instinct in the making” (Leopold 239). In nature, the overall system controls its health, not the individuals in it. A deer will not consciously stop eating a specific species of grass because it senses the resource’s impending collapse. The deer will go on eating until the species is gone, then starve to death or learn to substitute another species for its meal. Through their history, humans have lived essentially by the same rules, taking from the earth as they pleased with little thought to the finite nature of the planet’s resources. In a world where human populations were subject to the same culling as other living things, our disregard for the health of the planet might be mitigated by natural processes. However, since our numbers and our conduct have not (yet) been checked by nature, Leopold calls for a land ethic that “changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain members and citizens of it” (Leopold 240).

When confronted by the challenges of philosophers and activists who believe Leopold’s views too radical to be compatible with the basic principals of human rights, Starkey draws a compelling comparison between the norms of propriety in human society and the norms of propriety when interacting with nature (155). He suggests that humans have treated the natural world with the same disrespect that is commonly seen between people when social norms and ethical rules are not upheld. Harming and stealing from others has widely been shunned in human society and while a lack of respect for others is not generally punishable, most human societies do have behavioral norms that are expected to be followed. Starkey goes on to suggest that those with sociopathic disorders (those acting with impulsiveness, deceitfulness, antisocial behavior, and without a sense of guilt or responsibility) treat their own societies the way the average human treats the natural world (154). In human society, these rogue citizens and generally the exception rather than the rule. If we acknowledge our place in and dependence on the natural world as Leopold suggests, we would then be obligated to extend our ethics and norms of conduct to it. This would include a respect for the biotic whole that would preclude many of our resource based economic systems and demand a new collective perspective and moral code. If humans were to accept their place in the biotic community, they would be no more likely to fell a 100-year-old tree to pad their pockets than steal a purse.

Another criticism leveled against the land ethic is that it fails to adequately address the economic restructuring that would surely be needed if humans included the natural world in their ethical sphere. In terms of economics, there are no easy answers, and Leopold was the fist to admit it. The most difficult part of adopting the land ethic is that our current economic system would have to change radically, and humans (or any creature) are generally reluctant to jeopardize their prosperity. The cost-benefit system widely used in business responds to the will of the masses through supply and demand. “Devoting resources to one thing––such as wildlife conservation––is to move resources away from other things that are valued by humans, and so decisions regarding the use of the land are reducible to the determination of the relative costs and benefits of, for example, producing consumer goods versus preserving wildlife” (Starkey 152). The individualism and freedom all humans covet, particularly in the west, would have to be replaced by communities working together with the land. The responsibility of stewardship would fall largely on the individual landowner who would ideally develop a sense of pride in the health of their land (Vaughn 156). Despite his experiences with farmers and their tendency toward short-sighted practices, he maintained “an ethical obligation on the part of the private land owner is the only visible remedy for these situations” (Leopold 251). Since we can only extend our ethics to things we can “see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in” the individual would need to take responsibility for the health of his land and make sure it supported the biotic community (including himself) (Leopold 251). While this dramatic shift in our attitude toward economics will not be easy or quick, Leopold believed it is our only choice.

While Darwin, Elton, Muir, and even Pinchot had laid the foundation for Leopold’s land ethic, his pragmatic approach to philosophy and ecology made Leopold unique in the history of ecologists. While the words of Leopold and others of his time reverberated through the world community in the middle and second half of the 20th century, other factors prompted people to take notice of the environmental crisis, such as the increased visibility of water and air pollution, chemical poisoning of land and people, soil erosion, and the increased extinction rate of species (Nelson 445).

The extinction of the passenger pigeon (Ectopistes migratorius) was one of the most significant and well publicized human-caused ecological disasters of the 19th century, and to this day is remembered as a potent example of the destructive power and greed of humans. In 1900 the last wild passenger pigeon was killed in Iowa; Leopold was 13 years old. As many as 5 billion passenger pigeons (one quarter of all bird life in North America) migrated through the continent east of the Rocky Mountains, their massive flocks blocking out the sun for hours on end (Blockstein 982). The states of Iowa and Wisconsin, where Leopold spent his first and last years, were major breeding grounds for the birds.

The knowledge that humans could cause the extinction of an entire species, much less the most abundant bird in North America, shook Leopold and many Americans to the core. Before the threat of nuclear annihilation, or global climate change made their way into the nightmares of Americans, the extinction of the passenger pigeon was for many the first alert of many that humans could not do as they pleased in regard to the natural world. In 1900 the world shrank a little, its resources suddenly seeming finite and vulnerable rather than vast and unconquerable. Because these problems were increasingly in need of ethical as well as practical answers, Leopold’s land ethic provided the perfect fuel for a new generation of activists, scientists, and writers.

In 1962, Rachel Carson published the book Silent Spring, which helped to expand the public’s view of the environmental crisis from their back yard to the planet as a whole. The Widespread use of DDT and other pesticides and herbicides in industrialized agriculture presented new challenges that Leopold had not faced and so had presented few answers for. Though Carson criticized Leopold’s commitment to hunting (Opheim 3), her writing reflects a view of nature (and humans) that can be healthy but is too often polluted by economics. A notion at leased partially forged by Leopold two decades earlier. While Carson and others bravely took up Leopold’s torch, they had to face an entirely new set of problems and started the long (and yet uncompleted) battle against the notion that the modern world is not an entirely problem-free one (McKibben 365).

Additionally the human population explosion became ever more noticeable and well reported with the world population doubling from 3 billion in 1959 to more than 6 billion in 1999 according to the U.S. Census Burough. While the entirety of human history was needed to reach a world population of 1 billion in 1804, the most recent increase of the same amount took only 12 years (West 203). Adopting a far more radical view toward the environment and population than Leopold was Garrett Hardin. In his 1968 essay The Tragedy of the Commons, Hardin presented the idea that only strict governmental protection of public lands could insure the survival of the natural world from an ever increasing number of people, all looking for their share of the “commons.” He argued that the government should go even further by controlling human populations, coercively if necessary (Burger & Gochfeld 6). While world populations raised concerns about the availability of food and water, the reality of nuclear destruction or annihilation was brought to forefront of thought after WWII and during the Cold War. Environmental thinking during the second half of the 20th century was marked by the notion that the world is small and its resources finite and that the possibility of being replenished from elsewhere is nonexistent (Nelson 446).

In his 1984 book Biophilia, E. O. Wilson suggests that humans have an innate affection for all living things that stems from our evolution and biology (McKibben 671). This point of view arose from his long years spent in many of the world’s wildest and species-rich places. Borrowing heavily from Leopold, Wilson developed his own ethical questions and answers dealing specifically with the human perception of time, the loss of biodiversity, and balancing religion and science. He feels that the inborn human love for all living things, what he calls biolphilia, is our single greatest tool to combat the environmental crisis, the most important component of which is the loss of biodiversity. Using Leopold’s “three phase of ethics” model, Wilson suggests that our ethical concerns wax and wane with our understanding of a subject. When humans know very little about something, their minds turn to ethics. After they understand it somewhat, they invest great amounts of time and energy in knowing everything there is to know about it. Once the subject is reasonably well understood, their thoughts again turn to ethics (Wilson 119). Wilson, like Leopold hopes we are entering this third phase. But the human perception of time cripples these efforts to some degree. Because humans think and live in biochemical time (hours and seconds), they will never be able to understand the health of the biotic community that exists in ecological time (centuries and millennia) (43). “We want health, security, freedom, and pleasure for ourselves and our families. For distant generations we wish the same but not at any great personal cost” (120). For Wilson, the fate of the environment hinges on biophilia and the inborn, but perhaps suppressed, human desire to be a part of the biotic community.

In the half century after Leopold’s death, the fabric of society and its relationship to the land changed radically. Because he died before industrialized agriculture overtook the Midwest and the vast majority of farmland was consolidated under just a few tenants, he focused his ethical solutions on the individual farmers of the Midwest and not on the society as whole. In the introduction to A Sand County Almanac, Leopold wrote “Like winds and sunsets, wild things were taken for granted until progress began to do away with them. Now we face the question whether a still higher ‘standard of living’ is worth its cost in things natural, wild, and free.” Leopold would have lamented that many of his most poignant statements would become more rather than less relevant as time went on. In light of these changes and the understanding that the environmental crisis was in fact global, environmental philosophers found that Leopold’s land ethic needed a more robust social element (Scoville 68). During that time environmental philosophy blossomed into many schools of thought including anthropocentrism, zoocenterism, biocenterism/ecocenterism, universal consideration, ethical holism, ecofeminism (Nelson 447), ecotheology, and others. While Aristotle was more liberal than others of his time in extending human ethics to nonhuman beings in his nicomachean code of ethics, a truly inclusive ethic was not conceived of until Leopold’s land ethic. Only then, and with the help of an increasingly obvious environmental crisis, did philosophers begin to widely contemplate “the nature of humanity, the nature of the nonhuman world, and the nature of an appropriate relationship between the two” (Nelson 446).

Just as every living thing has always looked out for itself, so too had humans been largely anthropocentric until the time of Muir, Thoreau and Leopold. While some philosophers continued along this path, correctly stating that an environmental crisis is also a crisis for humans, other followed a relatively new path, exploring Leopold’s land ethic and granting rights to humans and the rest of the living world in equal measure. Still others pushed farther, choosing to examine human patterns of thought, values, and how collective knowledge has contributed to the environmental crisis and so might be in need of serious consideration. In addressing our environmental concerns, philosophers have forged several new paths, the difference between them generally revolving around the rights they grant to the nonhuman world.

Anthropocentrists believe that only humans have value and need to be considered in regard to ethics. Nonhuman species are considered insofar as they impact humans. The environmental crisis is of concern to the anthropocetrist, but only because it impacts humans negatively. While Leopold was an anthropocentrist, his views were far boarder. Gofford Pinchot of the U.S. Forest Service represented the anthropocentric point of view through and through and was criticized by Leopold for his narrow field of view. Zoocentists differ only in that they extend rights and ethics to certain nonhuman species that that are similar to humans. Biocentrists or ecocenterists, such as Leopold (though he never used these terms) believe that all living things should be included in the human ethical sphere. The worth and value of nonhuman species is irrelevant, only their right to life and their place in the biotic community matter. Those subscribing to universal consideration believe that all things, living and inanimate, have value beyond human use and should be included in the human ethical sphere (Nelson 446-448). In A Sand County Almanac, Leopold’s essay Thinking Like a Mountain (137) considers the value of a biotic community and each of its component parts including the living (and dead) species, as well as the mountain itself. “The cowman who cleans his range of wolves does not realize that he is taking over the wolf’s job of trimming the herd to fit the range. He has not learned to think like a mountain. Hence we have dustbowls, and rivers washing the future into the sea” (Leopold 140). In this essay Leopold discusses the principles of ethical holism, which is concerned with the rights and application of ethics to the biosphere as a whole. James Lovelock’s 1979 book Gaia took the idea one step further, stating that the earth was a single organism (Flannery 13). Ecofeminism has linked the historical oppression of women by men with that of the natural world by humans. When the environmental crisis became a global one, ecojustice philosophers began to analyze “how the cost of environmentally negligent behavior must be unfairly borne by some but not others (Nelson 448). With climate change affecting sea levels, low-lying island states throughout the world are threatened with inundation (Roper 1).

The philosophical field of ecotheology exists at the crossroads of religion and the natural world and attempts to understand the role of God in a world defined by science. While many discuss the general relationship of God to the natural world, others have taken a stand either embracing Leopold’s land ethic in a religious context or decrying it, stating that though the land does occupy a moral place in the Christian and Hebrew traditions, humans maintain a morally and ethically superior position (Scoville 61). Stewartship theologists seek to redefine human’s relationship to the earth, taking parts of the land ethic while dismissing others. Their thoughts hinge on the notion that the natural world was a gift from God and that we must care for it as God cares for humans. One major critique of this philosophy is that it fails to address the relationship of humans to the natural world, instead describing them as caretakers of a precious gift, rather then integral member of a biotic community. Process theologists see many natural processes as inherently violent and view the daily life and death struggle in nature as a perpetual battle between good and evil. Moreover, it’s believed that the environmental crisis is caused not by an inherent lack of respect for the land, but by the degradation of Judeo-Christian moral values in society. If humans upholding these values, the land will flourish; if not, the environment is doomed. The challenge of ecotheologists is to balance the ethical needs of the religious community with those of the broader society and of the environment (Scoville 64, 69).

In a fortuitous convergence of history and brilliance, Aldo Leopold and his ideas about land ethics became the launching point for the modern environmental movement. From a small field of disparate notions, Leopold forged a cohesive ethical philosophy with eloquent, impassioned, and emotionally sensitive writing that made undeniable ethical and biological sense to many people. Since Leopold’s death in 1948, environmental ethics have come to play a role in nearly every field from the daily affairs of citizens to politics and even in corporate boardrooms. Leopold had no illusions that his land ethic would be truly understood, much less adopted within his lifetime. While I can’t say humans are closer to embracing their place in the biotic whole, they do appear to be slowly gathering under a banner of environmental preservation. On the very farm where Leopold articulated his land ethic in Sauk County, Wisconsin, a 12,000 square foot environmental education center now stands. The immense building, seemingly incongruous with Leopold’s vision, produces 110% of its own electricity without the use of fossil fuels and was built entirely with stones from the land and with trees Leopold planted more than 60 ago (Jenkins 43). In the introduction to A Sand County Almanac Leopold says, “For us of the minority, the opportunity to see geese is more important than television, and the chance to find a pasque-flower is a right as inalienable as free speech.” I for one, see the minority he speaks of slowly becoming a majority.

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