LAND ETHIC

John Locke Second Treatise of Government (1690):

WHAT IS THE STATE OF NATURE?

“A state of equality wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another...the state of nature has a law of nature to govern it (and reason is that law), which obliges everyone and teaches mankind that all (being) equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health liberty or possessions.” (Locke 8).

“Men living together according to reason, without a common superior on earth, with authority to judge between them, is properly the state of nature.” (88).

WHAT IS A LAND ETHIC? ALDO LEOPOLD 1949

The Ethical Sequence

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 symbioses in which the original free-for-all competition has been re placed, in part, by co-operative mechanisms with an ethical content.

The complexity of co-operative mechanisms has increase with population density, and with the efficiency of tools. It 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.

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 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?

THE LAND ETHIC: 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.

ASSIGNMENT: Take John Locke's apriori moral obligation to respect and honor the innocent life, liberty, health, equality, and property of other humans and include the apriori moral obligation to respect and honor the innocent life and health of ecosystems:

WHAT IS THE STATE OF NATURE?

“A state of equality wherein all the power and jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than another...the state of nature has a law of nature to govern it (and reason is that law), which obliges everyone and teaches mankind that all (being) equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his life, health liberty or possessions.” (Locke 8).