Aldo Leopold’s ‘Land Ethic,’ and it’s Place in the 21st Century
In his posthumous 1949 work, “A Sand County Almanac,” Aldo Leopold coined the term, ‘land ethic,’ to essentially describe how different levels of the environment worked and how they were, ultimately, co-dependent.
His work received widespread critical acclaim and invented the ‘Land Pyramid’ model, which showed how soil and decomposed matter were just as important to the food system as orcas, bears, and lions. Aldo Leopold admitted that his mantra, “a [thing] is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community,” was not an “ethical absolute,” as he would have assumed it be far too radical to forbid all development. Along with Rachel Carson and John Muir, Aldo Leopold is considered one of the leading environmentalists. He assumed his work and the science he was drawing upon about our relationship with land would remain scientifically relevant for years, as his society was far. He did not set any form of criteria, recommendations, or even potential solutions, to achieve a state of “harmony between man and land.” His work, while supreme in the field at the time, did not correctly estimate the intense expansion of development that would occur over the following decades, mimicking numbers during the time of the Industrial Revolution, and thus was viewed as more of a beautiful piece of writing, as compared to an outline on limiting environmental degradation.
As one of the leading environmentalists of his time and all time, Aldo Leopold could expand the scope of the environmental movement and make a book about the environment become ‘must-read’ literature. Despite the prowess it still holds in the literary world, one might be right in assuming that Leopold did not mean for his book to be a guideline on how damaging climate change might be. The book romanticizes the relationship between land and man, flora and fauna, natural and, arguably, unnatural. Unlike Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, President Kennedy’s support for the Clean Air Act helped solidify. This very technical piece describes the relationship between pesticide use and farming land; Leopold’s work was almost purely literary. How, though, was he supposed to know that American’s would be so unwilling to help the environment that his novel published both environmentalists and climate change deniers would still reference pre-1950. Although the climate change deniers who reference his book have missed the point, it is incredibly symbolic that, in 60 years, no other book, piece of art, or entertainment, except maybe An Inconvenient Truth, has held the same influence in its field, proving how little the area of climate change has produced and how little Americans want to hear about it.
For science and technology to have evolved so much in the past half-century, and environmental studies to not have evolved with it, proves how we have barely begun the fight in climate change, and if action is not taken immediately, the fate of humanity will forever be doomed.
