Debunking Myths About Aldo Leopold’s Environmental Philosophy

How two sentences in Leopold’s famous essay, ‘the land ethic,’ became so widely influential, and so widely misinterpreted.

Jessica Wildfire
The Apeiron Blog

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Photo by Peter Vanosdall on Unsplash

Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) was a wildlife manager, forester, conservationist, and university professor. The fields of environmental ethics and conservation biology have been profoundly influenced by Leopold’s ideas about environmental ethics, in particular, due to his classic essay ‘The Land Ethic’ in A Sand County Almanac.

What is Leopold’s ‘land ethic’?

Aldo Leopold’s land ethic has become extremely influential in conservation biology and is based on four basic ideas (#4 is the trouble-maker):

  1. First, Leopold argued that the moral community, or, what Leopold calls “the land” should include soils, waters, plants, and animals.
  2. Second, human beings must stop viewing themselves as controllers or conquerors of nature, and instead view their role as just another member of the land community.
  3. Third, Leopold argued that we can only be moral in relation to something we can understand, see, feel, respect, admire, love, or otherwise have faith in.
  4. And finally, in a statement that…

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