The land ethic has its roots in Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac [1]. There, Leopold defined the principle at the heart of the land ethic: 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 [2]. Today, environmental ethicists describe the land ethic as a form of holism or ecocentrism [3]. In fact, Leopold’s land ethic is both holistic and ecocentric.
A holistic ethic is one that recognizes the intrinsic value of more than just individuals. Such an ethic need not deny the intrinsic value of individuals; it merely needs to recognize more than individuals as bearers of intrinsic value. For example, two prominent theories of intrinsic value, sentientism and biocentrism are forms of individualism. Sentientism is the view that only minded individuals are bearers of intrinsic value. Biocentrism is the view that only individual living things are bearers of intrinsic value. A sentientist would recognize the value of only animals, whereas a biocentrist would recognize this and the intrinsic value of plant life, but both views are committed to the view that only individuals possess intrinsic value.
A holistic ethic is one that suggests at least some groups possess intrinsic value. In interpersonal ethics, a holist might suggest that the family unit itself possesses intrinsic value, in addition to the value the individual family members possess. In environmental ethics, a holist will suggest that more than just individual plants or individual animals possess intrinsic value. For example, a species holist will suggest that a species lineage is itself intrinsically valuable over and above the value of the individual species members. Thus, a species holist would suggest that the species of tigers is valuable in and of itself over and above the individual of a particular tiger in Asia and another individual tiger somewhere else.
To illustrate the difference between species holism and individualism, it will help to contrast the land ethic with an animal rights position. As a form of individualism and sentientism, the animal rights position would not regard the sterilization of some animals and the discontinuation of a species as wrong in and of itself if the individual animals were not harmed in the process. A species holist would regard the extinction of a species as wrong in and of itself [4].
The land ethic is a holistic environmental ethic because it recognizes the value of the biotic community, and not just individual members of the community, but it is also ecocentric because it regards the value of the individual members of the community as deriving from their role in the community. If a particular species of plants or animals provides ecosystem services that another plant or animal does not, the land ethic would suggest that it is more morally problematic to harm that plant or animal than another. Thus, Callicott suggests that predators may possess more intrinsic value than prey animals given the regulatory role they play in an ecosystem:
“Thus, to hunt and kill a white-tailed deer in certain districts may not only be ethically permissible, it might actually be a moral requirement, necessary to protect the local environment, taken as a whole, from the disintegrating effects of a cervid population explosion. On the other hand, rare and endangered animals like the lynx should be especially nurtured and preserved… From the perspective of the land ethic, predators generally should be nurtured and preserved as critically important members of the biotic communities to which they are native” (J. Baird Callicott, Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair. Environmental Ethics, Volume 2, Issue 4, Winter 1980, 320)
An individualist environmental ethic would deny this. For example, many animal ethicists argue that all animals are equal. The land ethicist denies this, even as it regards all animals as intrinsically valuable.
For this reason, the land ethicist also regards human beings as possessing a special moral value. Like many other species, human beings have historically been apex predators [5]. However, human beings are also the only confirmed moral agents in the biotic community. Thus, human beings can provide even greater ecosystem services than other predators. In this way, the land ethic approaches moderate anthropocentrism, or the view that human beings are the most intrinsically valuable species, but not the only intrinsically valuable species.
Of course, as an environmental ethic, the land ethic would not countenance many environmentally negligent behaviors human beings participate in. While the land ethic does recognize the pre-eminent value of human beings, the land ethic also suggests that an exploding human population is morally problematic and that human beings have moral obligations to reconsider the desired size of their families. Similarly, the land ethicist would suggest that human beings should significantly reduce the consumption of animal products, given the exorbitant environmental cost of raising animals for food. However, unlike an animal rights position which suggests that the killing of all animals is wrong, the land ethicist would suggest that sustainable and well-regulated hunting practices might even be the morally best course of action [6].
Despite the reasonableness of the view, the land ethic is not without its critics. One might also wonder whether a Christian approach to the land ethic is viable. I believe it is, but to formulate such an approach, I must first identify and explain some problems with Leopold’s land ethic. With these in view, I will explain why a Christian land ethic is not only desirable, but superior to Leopold’s original formulation.
Notes
[1] Leopold, Aldo. 1949. A Sand County Almanac . New York: Oxford University Press.
[2] Ibid., 18.
[3] Sandler, Ronald. 2018. Environmental Ethics: Theory in Practice . New York: Oxford University Press, 243.
[4] For this reason, J. Bair Callicott, one of the most prominent land ethicists in the 20th century, criticized the animal liberation movement for its failure to appreciate this loss. See: Callicott, J. Baird. 1980. Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair. Environmental Ethics, 2, 311-338.
[5] Dominguez-Rodrigo, Manuel. 2002. Hunting and Scavenging by Early Humans: The State of the Debate. Journal of World Prehistory 16 (1), 1-54.
[6] Thus, Callicott says, “From the perspective of the land ethic, the immoral aspect of the factory farm has to do far less with the suffering and killing of nonhuman animals than with the monstrous transformation of living things from an organic to a mechanical mode of being…The important thing, I would think, is not to eat vegetables as opposed to animal flesh, but to resist factory farming in all its manifestations, including especially its liberal application of pesticides, herbicides, and chemical fertilizers to maximize the production of vegetable crops…On the ethical question of what to eat, it answers, not vegetables instead of animals, but organically as opposed to mechanic-chemically produced food. Purists like Leopold prefer, in his expression, to get their "meat from God," i.e., to hunt and consume wildlife and to gather wild plant foods, and thus to live within the parameters of the aboriginal human ecological niche. Second best is eating from one's own orchard, garden, henhouse, pigpen, and barnyard. Third best is buying or bartering organic foods from one's neighbors and friends.” Callicott, Animal Liberation: A Triangular Affair. Environmental Ethics, 335-336
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Walter Scott Stepanenko is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at John Carroll University in Cleveland, Ohio. His current research focuses on issues that emerge at the intersection of science and theology in philosophy of religion. He received his PhD from the University of Cincinnati where he completed a dissertation on the limits of moral demandingness with attention to the demandingness of the obligations of individual human actors with respect to climate change. He is a former Research Associate at the Center for Religious Understanding at the University of Toledo (Ohio).
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