The Land Ethic

by Aldo Leopold

1949

[ This essay is excerpted from Aldo Leopold's book A Sand

County Almanac. ]

When god-like Odysseus returned from the wars in Troy,

he hanged all on one rope a dozen slave-girls of his
household 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.

THE ETHICAL SEQUENCE

This extension of ethics, so far studied only by

philosophers, is actually a process in ecological evolution.
Its sequences may be described in ecological as well as
well as in philosophical terms. An ethic, ecologically, is a
limitation on freedom of 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 these symbioses. Politics
and economics are advanced symbioses 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. It
was simpler, for example, to define the anti-social uses of
sticks and stones in the days of the mastodons than of
bullets 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
not 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.

THE COMMUNITY CONCEPT

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 down
river. 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
worthless, 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
assumption 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 ciénegas 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, what
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.

THE ECOLOGICAL CONSCIENCE

Conservation is a state of harmony between man and land.
Despite nearly a century of propaganda, conservation still
proceeds at a snail's pace; progress still consists largely of
letterhead pieties and convention 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 machines, if you will write your own
rules for land-use. Each county may write its own rules,
and these 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 selected 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 a 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 per cent 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.

SUBSTITUTES FOR A LAND ETHIC

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
songbirds 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
songbirds were supposed to be disappearing.
Ornithologists jumped to the rescue with some distinctly
shaky evidence to 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, raptoral 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 is 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 been 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.

There is a clear tendency in American conservation to

relegate to government all necessary jobs that private
landowners 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.

THE LAND PYRAMID

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 flows

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 large 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
not 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
enabled him to make changes of unprecedented violence,
rapidity, and scope.

One change is in the composition of floras and faunas. The

larger predators are lopped off the apex of the pyramid;
food chains, for the first time in history, become shorter
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 and
floras, some species get out of bounds as pests and
diseases, 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 plants

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 of
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
plowland; many new plants and animals are introduced,
some of which escape 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 and 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 a
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 what unsuspected ways may they be
essential to its maintenance? Professor Weaver proposes
that we use prairie flowers to reflocculate the wasting soils
of the dust bowl; who knows for what purpose cranes and
condors, otters and grizzlies may some day be used?

LAND HEALTH AND THE A-B CLEAVAGE

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 well
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 as
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.

THE OUTLOOK

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, of course, I 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,
an intense consciousness of land. Your true modern is
separated 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 a 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 as

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.