The Land Is Our Community

Book excerpt: "Informed by his experiences as a hunter, forester, wildlife manager, ecologist, conservationist, and professor, Aldo Leopold developed a view he called the land ethic. The essay setting out his ideas was published posthumously in 1948 and has been extremely influential in environmental ethics as well as conservation biology and related fields. The land ethic called for an expansion of our ethical obligations beyond the purely human to include what Leopold variously called the "land community" or the "biotic community"--communities of interdependent humans, non--human animals, plants, soils, and waters, understood collectively. Using an approach grounded in environmental ethics and the history and philosophy of science, Roberta Millstein offers a new interpretation of Leopold's land ethic and a new defense of it in light of contemporary ecology"--