A Land Ethic

Island property owners often reflect on the benefits their property’s natural resources provide to them and other Islanders.  These include everything from basics like clean drinking water to the real bonus of open space and views.

Maybe it’s harder, though, to think just as often about the benefits we should provide to these resources in return.  The challenge is that the historical pattern in America has been of people depleting resources more than supporting or enhancing them.  Some Americans may even feel this is the way it’s supposed to be, that resources are forever plentiful or, if they aren’t, human needs should come before the needs of the non-human world, regardless of consequences.

While most Islanders don’t feel this way, we still might struggle to keep the pay-it-back model always in mind because, while attitudes about resource abuse have been changing, America still seems to lack an overall framework for a better prevailing attitude.  The field of environmental philosophy may offer some help in this area.  Warning:  abstract concepts ahead!

Let’s start with some basics.  Whatever your stance on the topic of getting and giving when it comes to the natural world, notice the binary that’s implied in the equation:  human/non-human.  In this frame of thinking, we humans stand separate from a wholly other entity, the non-human.  Maybe evolution or Western society or even America’s Puritan/Enlightenment origins have set up this binary in our minds.  Regardless, it’s false.  But, since the binary comes from such big sources, it’s deeply embedded in us and hard to shake.  

How can we get beyond this false binary?  We can adopt an ecological land ethic.

A land ethic is a set of values guiding how human beings relate to the natural world.  An ecological land ethic promotes values based in the interdependence of everything in a given ecosystem, including us.  This kind of relational thinking makes equal the rights of people and the rights of every other being (and, for that matter, non-being, such as a stream or shoreline).  Within this ethic, all elements of an ecosystem should benefit all others, with the needs of each element held in balance with the overall needs of the system.

The originator of the idea of a distinctly ecological land ethic was Aldo Leopold, the mid-twentieth-century founder of modern ecology.  Leopold saw in practice the effects of his era’s false belief in the supremacy of the human over the non-human, the supposed inexhaustibility of natural resources for our use, and the alleged benefits to people of what was, in fact, reckless, unmanaged tourism.

In the face of the depletion and devastation, Leopold claimed citizenship for every ecological element.  A place’s ecology became a “community”; his extension to the natural world of a term usually applied to humans alone was intentional—it broke down the human/non-human binary.

A community is healthy, Leopold concluded, only if all its “citizens”—human or not—continue to exist and thrive.

Tom Amorose

Tom is a board member and forest stewardship aficionado. He serves on the Land Trust’s Stewardship, Farm, Conservation, and Executive Committees.

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