The Land Is Our Community
Aldo Leopold’s Environmental Ethic for the New Millennium
Abstract
A contemporary defense of conservationist Aldo Leopold’s vision for human interaction with the environment.
Informed by his experiences as a hunter, forester, wildlife manager, ecologist, conservationist, and professor, Aldo Leopold developed a view he called the land ethic. In a classic essay, published posthumously in A Sand County Almanac, Leopold advocated for an expansion of our ethical obligations beyond the purely human to include what he variously termed the “land community” or the “biotic community”—communities of interdependent humans, nonhuman animals, plants, soils, and waters, understood collectively. This philosophy has been extremely influential in environmental ethics as well as conservation biology and related fields.
Using an approach grounded in environmental ethics and the history and philosophy of science, Roberta L. Millstein reexamines Leopold’s land ethic in light of contemporary ecology. Despite the enormous influence of the land ethic, it has sometimes been dismissed as either empirically out of date or ethically flawed. Millstein argues that these dismissals are based on problematic readings of Leopold’s ideas. In this book, she provides new interpretations of the central concepts underlying the land ethic: interdependence, land community, and land health. She also offers a fresh take on of his argument for extending our ethics to include land communities as well as Leopold-inspired guidelines for how the land ethic can steer conservation and restoration policy.
Keywords
Aldo Leopold, biodiversity, conservation biology, environmental ethics, environmental policy, interdependence, land community, land ethic, land health, stabilityDOI
10.7208/chicago/9780226834474.001.0001ISBN
9780226834467, 9780226834481, 9780226834474, 9780226834474Publisher
University of Chicago PressPublisher website
https://press.uchicago.edu/index.htmlPublication date and place
2024Classification
Philosophy
Impact of science and technology on society
Conservation of the environment