The Land Ethic and the Ethics of Land: Some brief notes on Aldo Leopold and environmental ethics today (original) (raw)

Conference program Coining the term ‘the land ethic’ in 1949, Aldo Leopold has become an influential figure for the development of ecology until today. Despite Leopold’s enduring legacy, however, many have increasingly come to challenge and expand on his thesis. This paper proposes to take a brief look at Leopold’s seminal land ethic in contrast with strands of contemporary environmental ethics that see the intersectional entanglements that make up ‘land.’ It reconsiders Leopold’s notion of ‘land’ in light of postcolonial, queer, feminist and environmental ethical philosophies. Not only Leopold, but other prominent biocentrist thinkers such as Arne Naess, have been criticized for neglecting the importance of good human-to-human relationships as part of their ecological thinking about nature. Indigenous environmental ethics, for instance, goes further than Leopold by considering the reciprocities and interdependencies between both sentient and non-sentient beings. Our responsibilities to the land are connected to our responsibilities to one another. Moreover, it should go without saying that Indigenous peoples had to be murdered and dispossessed of their land in Turtle Island, so that Leopold could stand on and make an argument for ‘his’ North American land. Notwithstanding, the ethical qualities of the land must be addressed across the world. This may be done, one could argue, by taking into consideration not only the biological imperative for land conservation and sustainability, but also my relationship with the land as socially, historically, culturally, and affectively constructed. This requires that I learn and feel with my land and the land that I stand on. The approach taken in this paper hopes not only to displace Western, capitalist and anthropocentric notions of the land from environmental ethics, but also to recognize my own embeddedness to the land as an ethical principle which includes all human and more-than-human ecologies.