When god-like
Odysseus returned from the wars in Troy, he hanged all on one rope a dozen
slave-girls of his house-hold, 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 sequence may be described in ecological as well as
in philosophic terns. An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom action
in the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically is a differentiation
of social from anti-social 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 fees symbioses. Politics and
economics are advanced syrnbioses 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. was simpler, for example, to define the
anti-social uses sticks and stones in the days of the mastodons than of bullet
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 no
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 downriver.
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 worth-less, 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 assurnption 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 cane-lands 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 cienegas 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, which 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 men and land. Despite nearly a century of
propaganda, conservation still proceeds at a snail's pace; progress still
consists largely letterhead pieties and conventional 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 machinery, if
you will write your own rules for land-use. Each county may write its own
rules, and they 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 elected 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
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 percent 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
songbird 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 song birds were supposed to be disappearing. Ornithologists jumped to
the rescue with some distinctly shaky evidence 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, raptorial 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 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 seen 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 reflood muskrat marshes is a case in point.
Where
is a clear tendency in American conservation to relegate to government all
necessary jobs that private land owners 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 flow 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 larger 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-cow-farmer. 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 no
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 enable him to make changes of unprecedented violence, rapidity, and
scope.
One
change is in the composition of floras and fauna. The larger predators are
lopped off the apex of the pyramid food chains, for the first time in history,
become short 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 an floras, some species get out of bounds as pests
and disease, 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 plant 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 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 world-wide 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 plow land; many
new plants and animals are introduced, some of which escaped 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 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 which unsuspected ways may they be essential to its maintenance?
Professor Weaver proposes that we use prairie flowers to re-flocculate the
wasting soils of the dust bowl; who knows 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
we 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 a 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:
Whether
you will or not
You are a King, Tristram, for you are one
Of the time-tested few that leave the world,
When they are gone, not the same place it was.
Mark what you leave.
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, I
of course 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, a intense consciousness of land. Your true modern is separate 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 co-extensive 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 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 an 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.
Aldo
Leopold was born in Burlington, Iowa, on January 11 1887. As a boy he developed
a lively interest in field ornithology and natural history and after schooling
in Burlington, at Lawrenceville Prep in New Jersey, and the Shefield Scientific
School at Yale, he enrolled in the Yale forestry school, the first graduate
school of forestry in the United States. Graduating with a masters in 1909, he
joined the U.S. Forest Service, by 1912 was supervisor of the million-acre
Carson National Forest, and in 1924 accepted the position of Associate Director
of the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin, the principal
research institution of the Forest Service at that time. In 1933 he was
appointed to the newly created chair in Game Management at the University of
Wisconsin, a position he held until his death.
Leopold
was throughout his life at the forefront of the conservation movement—indeed,
he is widely acknowledged as the father of wildlife conservation in America.
Though perhaps best known for A Sand County Almanac, he was also an
internationally respected scientist, authored the classic text Game
Management, which is still in use today, wrote over 350 articles, mostly on
scientific and policy matters and was an advisor on conservation to the United
Nations He died of a heart attack on April 21, 1948 while helping his neighbors
fight a grass fire. He has subsequently been named to the National Wildlife
Federation's Conservation Hall of Fame, and in 1978, the John Burroughs
Memorial Association awarded him the John Burroughs Medal for his lifework and,
in particular, for A
Sand County Almanac.