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“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
land.”
--Aldo Leopold
History of Aldo Leopold
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WqlplteQj4
What is Ethics?
• Ethics help us to decide how we
ought to live, what a “good” life
is, and how we should behave.
• An ethical statement
(a)expresses a value (rather
than a fact), and
(b) is “prescriptive” (rather than
“descriptive”).
• An ethical statement expresses how the world
should be (we shouldn’t pollute). A factual
statement, on the other hand, expresses how
things are (people do pollute).
Broad Sense
• an ethic helps us to identify
what is valuable or good; what
we want to do with our lives;
how we want to organize and
prioritize our lives in order to
achieve a meaningful
existence.
Ethics are guidelines for behavior
• an ethic will help us to decide what we should
do---it is a kind of “code of conduct” that
regulates our (collective) behaviors.
Environmental Ethic
• It expresses our values toward nature and
guides our behaviors with respect to the
environment.
• Behaviors “spill over” into a public sphere
Land Ethic
• ethic dealing with man's relation to land and
to the animals and plants which grow upon it
Next Step in Evolution of Ethics
• the expansion of ethics to include nonhuman
members of the biotic community, collectively
referred to as "the land." Leopold states the
basic principle of his land ethic as, "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."
First Key
• human considerations regarding the land and
land use central to environmental decisionmaking and practice, but does not go as far as
to make the land itself deserving of human
moral consideration.
Second Key
• to rethink our notion of what it means to say
something deserves our human moral
consideration (is “morally considerable”).
Third Key
• to rethink what it is to be human
• that humans are different from and superior
to nonhuman animals and “nature” since
humans are atomistic, individualistic, rational,
self-interested pleasure or preference
maximizers.
Fourth Key
• human beings as essentially (and not merely
accidentally) emotional, relational, ecological
selves who are members of both human and
ecological communities
Fifth Key
• rethink what counts as a morally relevant
value in ethics, ethical decision-making,
environmental policy and philosophy.
Sixth
• to rethink the role of
emotion, care, love and
empathy in what it means for
humans to owe things to
each other and the land.--requires the development of
emotional, experiential (e.g.,
hands-on) ecological literacy
Seventh Key
• to understand the relationships between
ecological diversity and cultural diversity in
the creation, maintenance and perpetuation
of human and land health.
Land Health
• The culture of primitive peoples is often based
on wildlife. Thus the plains Indian not only ate
buffalo, but buffalo largely determined his
architecture, dress, language, arts, and
religion.” The value and loss of cultural
diversity is intimately connected with the
value and loss of biodiversity.
Eighth Key
• Makes forest and wilderness preservation
necessary for any adequate ethic,
environmental ethic or environmental policy.
Nineth Key
• that one need not have a Ph.D. in ecology in
order to “see” the value of Wilderness
Tenth Key
• The characteristics of the land determined the
facts as the characteristics of the men who
lived on it
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dmOh_FL
0fmU&feature=related
The Land Ethic--Ahead of its time
• the need to foster an
environmental ethic that
protects and preserves
wilderness for current and
future generations of
humans, nonhuman
animals and ecological
communities alike.