Aldo Leopold - relating stories of the land ethic

Aldo Leopold was an American ecologist, forester and environmentalist, who was influential in the forming of modern environmental ethics and wilderness preservation.

Here Leopold relates various stories to illustrate what he terms the land ethic to an interested friend.
Killing the wolf

AL: Looking out across a wilderness – a wild place full of animals, birds, insects, fish in its rivers and plant-life as the first rung up the food-chain, I came to realize that it exists in a sort of balance, a precarious one, I grant you, but a balance nevertheless.

First of all, the vegetable matter is food for the deer, which in turn are the prey of wolves. The land can support only as much as it can support and no more. Man steps into this wild place and shoots a few wolves and a few deer. Nothing much changes – at first. It’s only when more hunters come and the fun begins – shooting wolves because they are wolves – an animal to be feared – why not shoot the blasted things – they prey on the deer and that aint good. No deer, no hunting, so kill the wolf and the deer lives.

But the wolves placed limits on the number of deer in the wilderness – without that limit, deer proliferate, increase in numbers, and something happens – the vegetable cover starts to look a bit thin. Even the hunters notice how the juniper saplings are bitten almost down to the ground by the hungry deer. With no natural prey, the deer thrive, until they hit a ceiling – the amount of vegetation will not support the numbers of deer. Something has to give – plant-life becomes scarce – the deer get thin and some die. Plant cover becomes threadbare, the howling winds, violent storms and rushing streams take the bared earth away to silt up an ox-bow down the river a ways.

With the demise of the plant-life, everything starts to run out – topsoil that once was home to that most unassuming of creatures, the earthworm, is now bereft of any. Birds fly to pastures new or die on the fields as winter sets in.

Frost comes and does for what is left of that thin layer of humous that has supported life way back through time. The snow melts and rivulets of dirty brown water flow helter-skelter into a river that natives lower down have begun to nickname, ‘Old Muddy’.

The hunters move on to where they know the deer thrive – they have fun killing wolves on days when deer are few, and the whole thing starts over.

Left alone, the wild places survive, along with every living creature – flora and fauna to the zoologist and the botanist. Let man once walk across it with some design on it and the cycles of life and death, birth and rebirth become disrupted. Such men once called native Indians ignorant and primitive.

Buffalo and deer roamed across this country where none exist today. Ignorance dressed up in all the frippery of civilization has done for them, without it even being aware that it happened because of something done in its name.

The death of a species

AL: For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun. The Cro-Magnon who slew the last mammoth thought only of a loss of meat; the sportsman who shot the last pheasant thought only of the loss of sport; the sailor who fished the last whale out of the ocean thought of his lost livelihood. If we were to die, would the mammoth, the pheasant or the mighty whale mourn us.

RLF: But did not Cro-Magnon hunt the mammoth for food to feed his tribe? The trouble seems to have begun with those of us who kill for no other reason than we can, to show our prowess over the birds and beasts of the field. If we only killed to eat, and slew only what we could eat, the extinct would still be running about.

AL: Think of that great necessity, the fridge-freezer, full to its iced up lid with pieces of fish and meat - deep frozen to keep until we are ready to eat them. That is surely a symbol of what we have become, though it looks as normal to us as a carpet under our feet, or the table surrounded by chairs at which we sit down to eat.

In the time before refrigeration, man placed taboos on foodstuff that couldn’t well survive as something to be eaten more than a day or two after it had been hunted and killed. In climates hotter than this, the meat of the wild boar, while delicious if cooked and eaten immediately, was found to be full of canker and worm if left till the morrow.

The fridge shows our life for what it is. No longer hunter-gatherers, cropsharers, but industrialists with no time to do our killing, we employ others to do it in factory like repetition, the better to keep costs down. We treat our foodstuffs with preservatives and dyes that we may eat it wholly out of season, imagining its bright hues of red and yellow, green and purple to be natural, to look delicious, whatever it may taste like.

The fridge shows us up for what we really are and have become – accumulators, stockpilers rooted to that ‘science’ of artificial shortages and gluts, economics with its price elasticity to account for why people continue to buy something though its price has gone through the roof; with its laws of supply and demand – self-fulfilling prophecies by which we live and breathe, and by which we may one day die.
The forming of a land ethic

RLF: What do you mean by the term ‘land-ethic’ and why do we need one?

AL: As you know, land is designated chiefly as property, owned by someone, with a price on it. Up until now, owning property entails privileges but no obligations. A man’s land is there to do with as he sees fit. There are some limits on what he may do in some cases, but much land lies unprotected, particularly in those places whose laws are not fully developed, operational and enforceable.

RLF: But surely, even if so much land is under the law, limited as to its use, we would do well to adopt an ethic towards it as we have towards each other, if we are to save ourselves and the Earth that is our home and ultimate provider.

AL: That is precisely my point; that in the absence of any overall control of how land is misused and abused, what we need is a sort of charter of human rights, applied to land rather than people.

If destroying land becomes as unthinkable, for the many, as destroying human life, then we could be content that these abuses would cease. Do not forget that although temporary measures can be put in place to protect the integrity of the land and everything that lives on it, once the ecological threat ceases or is seen to have reduced, there are many who would go back to the old ways to make the cycle of destruction begin again.

If we come to see man, not as conquering Nature, but as cohabiting with it, living in peace with it, not placing it under duress, then our future would not look so dim.

As it is, we view land purely as economic units to be harvested, as so much space to be covered in concrete or worse, as a place to dump refuse, to despoil without a second thought.

RLF: That is surely not true of the land in national parks, protected by statute.

AL: That is true, there are pockets of land that have some significance to us and where exploitation is minimal, but what of the land that lies unprotected, demeaned and disrespected, what of that land? Does that land have any right to not be destroyed; I think not!

RLF: Which land are you thinking of?

AL: Land is land, is it not? All land is but a piece of the surface of the planet and as such is deserving of our respect, and yet much of it still goes without regard.

Take those parcels of land between the railway and the siding, or land that adjoins the highway in grassy banking and side of deep cuttings – how is that regarded? Is such land not regarded as unable to be saved, as passed

Deep Ecology – Interconnectedness

Robert L. Fielding

Deep ecology is the name of a movement that maintains that human beings are an integral part of our world. Instead of thinking of man at the tip of the food chain’ master of all he surveys, deep ecology is concerned with man’s role in the planet as one organism among many – that instead of thinking the world is there for us, deep ecologists believe that there is no relative value of life with us coming out on top, but rather that, according to Arne Naess, one of the founders of the movement, deep ecology seeks to develop ecological wisdom by focusing on deep experience, deep questioning, and deep commitment – constituting an interconnected system in which each gives rise to and supports the other in an entire system of thought and action Neass calls ‘an ecosophy’.

Naess rejects the notion that the different forms of life on Earth have ‘relative value’ – based upon whether animals have souls, can reason, or have any form of consciousness – in other words, a valuation that places man in the first rank and every other organism below him.

That way of thinking has led us to the brink of catastrophe, in which the planet cannot sustain our way of life. The movement urges us to rethink our view of ‘the good life’, realize the damage we are inflicting on our environment and change our behavior and our way of thinking so that catastrophe can be averted and life can continue.

Deep ecology goes one step further than a concern for the environment, paramount though that is, and asks us to focus on our perception of ourselves, not as dominant species, but as partners in the life of the planet.

It is the first movement in history to advocate a lower material standard of living.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deep_ecology
http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC22/Zimmrman.htm
In promoting the non-human world over the human one, deep ecology is in direct contrast to the techno- and anthropocentric approaches of so called shallow ecology – an ecology that does nothing to undermine our dominance over the natural world and hence does not address the real issue – our exploitation of the world and everything in it, for purely material lends.

Rather, as Warwick Fox claims, we and all other beings are ‘aspects of a single unfolding reality’.

For Aldo Leopold’s ‘Land Ethic’ “a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community.”
And since we are a part of that community, by inference, preserves our own stability, integrity and beauty.

Things are clearly not right when they work against those qualities, and environmentalists and deep ecologists contend that massive economic activity has pushed the biosphere off its natural course, through things like a reduction of biodiversity, climate change, causing mass extinction of species, which, if unchecked, will result in our own extinction.

Influencing social and political change through their philosophy (ecosophy) to redress the imbalances already far in advance of what is sustainable and safe is the ultimate goal of deep ecologists everywhere.


Robert L. Fielding

Council of All Beings
One of the forms of interaction that has evolved within deep ecology to challenge human-centeredness, and to try to reach out to this identification and solidarity with all life that Naess speaks of, is the Council of All Beings. The people gathering in the Council try to be a voice for other life forms, such as plants and animals, and for the wind, rivers, mountains, etc. Each person speaks before the other members of the Council, of how humankind has impacted upon him or her. Drums, flutes or other musical instruments can be used to call the Council together, or used after each Council member speaks.
http://www.elements.nb.ca/theme/ethics/deep/ecology.htm
What the rivers tell us
Aspenquid speaks:
“I am the voice of the rivers that flow over the land. I am the rivers that water the land. I am the rivers that give water to our people, and to all living things. I am the life of the land. I am purity flowing from mountain to shore.

My life is locked in ice in the big snows of the high mountain valleys. Then, my water is moving slowly over rock and stone, scraping both until shapes are made that will last until the next big snow comes. I am moving but like something that is old, only just living.

The land is cold, stone is jarred under my great weight, but still I move – down – down – down. Thaw starts, my frozen bones start to live again. My edges tinkle water in rivulets that will become torrents in only a short time.

Then big snow is melting and my water rushes down canyons cut by my fathers’ waters, I rush and swell until I meet the flat lands where the hand of man has confined my speed, culverted my madness to roar, tamed me.

I flow among sweet meadows where bird and beast stir to drink my water. I leach into the soil, fill it with my body, but now, returning to my main stream, I feel the weight of earth, and taste what man has put onto his fields, that are my resting place. That are full of space for me to dwell away from the harsh sunlight that is rising daily in the sky.

My movements are sluggish, more than last year. I am wasted by a hand I have not the power to stay. I am no longer pure, no longer my own self, bringing life to flowers, to waving corn, to feed the people who live one year at a time, not counting the balance in rows of numbers, but how well I fulfill my task of bringing life to all things. They hang their heads, finding that I am lacking what is needed every day.

I was not yours to culvert, confine before. I was free to do as the big snows bid me, and I brought joy to children’s faces as they stepped into my foam and laughed. Now, mothers prevent their little ones from stepping into that same foam, not the same colour, hurtful to little toes, little ankles, little feet.

My anguish is made of this, that I cannot provide all living things with life-giving water, and that I feel the hostility of mothers protecting their children, where before I felt only joy as they laughed and gurgled gaily in my shallows.

What plants tell us
Omar speaks:
I am the voice of the plants and trees that grow on the land. They tell me, not in words, you understand, but they tell me. They feed us, have fed us since the waters of the Nile inundated the land, since the days Pharaohs walked majestically along the banks of this mighty river. They too were mighty, but the waters rose and they gave thanks for water coming through jungle and desert to irrigate our land. The flowers, the trees, all living things that grow here in this fertile strip speak the same; they speak of the food they give, and they speak of the food given to them – the soils of this valley, rich and full of the Earth’s bounty – not to be compared to lesser boons brought by the hand of man to increase the harvest.

The harvest of goodness, the harvest that soil and the water provide, converted by greenness into food for man and beast, is not to be chained, and nor will it be increased without some lessening of its vitality to grow young bones – and nourish old ones – to spread in the strength of the oxen that pull great ploughshares through the soil.

Increase is not given lightly by these plants, these trees, and these flowers and grasses. Fescues are not built like towers of stone, by merely adding, rather, they flourish in a contract with the earth from which they spring.

This contract is no written thing – it is bound by ties of Nature – stronger than any that are able to keep the Pharaoh in his tomb. It is unwritten, but it is binding and may not be undone – unless you that try be undone totally when the time comes for the next harvest.

What animals tell us
Olaf speaks:
I am the voice of all beasts living in the land – here, we call the ice and rock both with the name of land. If it is able to bear the weight of a bear, it is called land by us who measure our winters, not as you do in months, weeks and days. Here we see our world changing day by day, from the bleakest, frozen days and nights when only beasts set forth to find food – for eat, they must, and not having our larders, the food they eat must be found, caught and killed. Be cheery, they do not kill out of lust for blood, revenge, hatred, but only out of their great need to eat.

This is the lesson they give us, though of course, they are not knowing anything of this as they go out into the great cold to find their next meal. Their lesson is this one – they do not desire or covet that which they do not need. They live for the moment – fearing not tomorrow or next winter.

What they know of climate that is changing is that they have few places to search, few places to hide from the hunter, as they are both hunter and hunted, even by those without the need to take their meat, break their bones or scalp them of their warmth giving coats of fur or feather.

Still it continues. They know nothing of the ways of the hunter, save that when he is seen, they fear him – have feared him since that first shot rang out across this frozen place.

The seal does not fear the polar bear. It knows nothing of fangs that rip flesh until fangs do that. It does not live in trepidation of attack, though it knows when to dive and when to spring up from the icy black water to breathe the freezing air.


What the mountains tell us
Norgay speaks:
I am the voice of the mountains rising to north and east, I am the sound of the Earth thrusting upwards under forces you can barely comprehend, through the eons of time you cannot conceive of. Regeneration and erosion are the forces that shape us. What was once an ocean floor is now the face of Lhotse; what was thousands of meters beneath millions of tons of rock is now the wall of a cirque, holding a tarn that looks like steel under a darkening sky.

The mountain is old, older than oceans – some say as old as the Earth itself, and being old, it has seen many things; many glorious leader in his pomp, go the way of all flesh, they who, being invincible across the steppes of the north, are no more than dust securing the roots of daffodils. Nature remains, mountains shift their heads and bow low to their Maker, man and beast, insect and flower are as the seasons only; they come and walk, they live and grow, and they grow old and die.

These peaks are not as white as I have seen them at this or any time of year. Man has set himself up against Nature – against the snow-white peaks of mountains, and rivers flow swollen, taking into the seas what can never be returned until the Earth folds this way and that and brings again to light what has been buried from sight for millennia.

Man cannot prevail, even as he is utterly fooled into thinking he can. Nothing prevails, not even mountains. They too are brought l

Are ex-Pats more creative?

Robert L. Fielding
Noticing patterns in your life also makes you notice differences as well as similarities. In a life lived away from your native shores, the differences probably outweigh the things that are the same.

Living your life a mile from where you grew up probably doesn’t present the same opportunity to observe – you might notice how things have changed, but, like the face of a loved one, you probably won’t notice that change.

If things are different, mistakes are more common – and although making mistakes is not being creative, what is known is that if you aren’t prepared to be wrong, you’ll never come up with something original – if you’re not prepared to be wrong!

Like ex- Pats, children live in a world continually in a state of flux. Consequently, children often make mistakes: “Sorry, Caroline can’t resist a moustache!” “Jonathan can never remember to be quiet in company!” – that type of thing. The thing with children though is that if they don’t know, they will still have a go.

I heard of a child appearing in a Nativity play as one of the three wise men, and when it came to his turn to say what he had brought, he said, “Frank sent this!”

Picasso once said that all children are born artists, the difficulty lies in remaining one into adulthood. Like children, ex Pats find themselves in situations in which they are not always sure how to proceed. They go ahead anyway and rely on the largesse of locals to forgive them – they learn – continually – every day.

Creativity not only requires imagination and inspiration, which anyone who has taken the plunge to change their life has in spades, it also requires emotional depth. Expats have this depth, for they carry with them the memories of their lives in their home country, and the gruelling farewells as they left it behind. But of course, it isn’t left behind. The past is there, informing the hidden creativity which is bursting to find an outlet as new challenges are met.
Margaret Graham.
Bestselling author and creative writing tutor.
Writer in Residence Yeovil, UK. www.margaret-graham.com

The creative world is full of people who lived in foreign climes – Earnest Hemingway spent much of his time out of the US, Paul Gaugin, Pablo Picasso, Rudyard Kipling, George Orwell and many more lived abroad for much of their lives.

Removed from their native communities, it may be that ex-pats either have more time to pursue their creative urges, or more opportunity, or both. Being creative requires confidence, and living with strangers can increase one’s confidence. Conversely, living close to lifelong peers sort of sets you out to conform.

I once worked in a small engineering company in which my liking poetry set me apart from the majority. It didn’t put me off reading poetry, it just put me off becoming like them!

If we can define being creative as finding other worlds in this one, then half of the job is already done for someone living away from home. ‘Nothing stays the same except change’ is one way of looking at life – here or at home these days, and so really, creativity should come equally easily to all of us – we just have to give ourselves a chance to become who we want to be.
Robert L. Fielding

Have We Got A Sixth Sense – Awareness?

Robert L. Fielding

Traditionally, we are said to have five senses: hearing, touch, taste, sight, and smell. However, no firm agreement has been reached on this number; since definitions of what constitutes a sense differ; some holding that we have five additional senses: a sense of pain (nociception), balance (equilibrioception), joint motion and acceleration (proprioception & kinesthesia), a sense of time, and a sense of temperature (thermoception).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senses
To these five major senses, couldn’t our sense of awareness be added. Sense, after all, doesn’t necessarily include having to be in physical contact with what is stimulating the senses. Sight and hearing clearly do not involve touching, whilst our sense of smell depends only upon molecules making contact with our olfactory systems.

Being aware can take a number of forms: we can be aware that we have met someone before, that the word ‘Tiddles’ will most likely be the name given to a pet – a cat – and that we have dialed the right telephone number, even when we cannot clearly or fully mentally remember the actual number.

How many times have you relied on the relative positions of the numbered buttons and the order in which they appear in the dialing code as and when you are dialing the number, rather than beforehand?

What is that? If it is memory, why do we have to remind ourselves by the act of actually dialing the number? It cannot be touch, because all the buttons feel the same. Direction seems to fit, but in this case, it is the direction and distance of the buttons relative to each other and in that particular order and no other – it seems to be a sense of direction coordinated by our consciousness.

It clearly has something to do with our memory, but we rarely think of it working through our sense of touch – in just that way. In a sense, all senses connect with our memory, even to inform us that we have never sensed something before.

Our awareness that the Earth revolves around the sun, for instance, may have something to do with our learned knowledge of the movement of planets in the solar system, and may be connected to our perceiving that the Earth’s position relative to the sun is continually changing.

It is this perception that I believe is linked to something like an ‘archaeology of our knowledge’ – a vestige of primordial awareness – but now quantified by the sciences and placed in more or less absolute terms in reference books.

What would stone-age men and women have ‘known’ of this movement? They would certainly have noticed it, but not having a concept, ‘sun’ or ‘Earth’, they would not know or be aware of what was happening – in the way we talk of knowing or being aware these days.

Our knowledge of the way we move in orbit around the sun has been handed down to us from Galileo and others. But our sense that one or both is moving goes back to those days of stone and flint. Without prior knowledge from our schooling, our senses would tell us little more than our predecessors knew about a lot of things. Could we, for example, say what the Moon is, or where it is, or how far away it is? Could we understand its phases, or that it affects our tides. The sciences have given us a lot, but has our awareness moved on? Just as the ruins of Ephesus mark the city and its borders, our sense of awareness marks the limits of our own knowledge of our world, and although it is probably growing continually with experience coupled to memory, some parts of it will not be so radically different from what they were at our beginnings.
Robert L. Fielding

Sense and Sensibility

Robert L. Fielding

That greatest of all teachers, Plato, scholar of Socrates, talks to his own student, Glaucon, of the power we possess to go beyond the senses to reason that which we cannot feel, see, hear or touch.

Before you read the dialogue, think about the answers to the ten questions below. Think about the nature of discovery.
Do we have to believe something is there before we go out and look for it?

1. Do you believe everything you see?
2. If not, why not?
3. Are there some things you can’t see?
4. What kind of things are they?
5. How has mankind managed to discover things he cannot see with his own eyes?
6. What is knowledge?
7. How is knowledge related to the truth?
8. Why do we prize knowledge?
9. Is there a difference between knowledge and information?
10. Are there still things left to discover?

Dialogue

Plato: Do you think we can see all there is to be seen, even if our eyesight is perfect?

Glaucon: Most definitely not. As often, we see what we are looking for or assume is there, and finding it confirms to us its presence.

P: Then much of what is cannot be seen by us, or if it is seen, does not register always with us as being real.

G: What have you in mind?

P: What about the wind – can we see that?

G: Yes, I think so.

P: If we can see it, of what does it consist?

G: Of air only. Yes, I see what you mean. We can only see the result of the wind – the trees bending in the wind and water whipped up in storms, but we cannot see what caused it?

P: Then can we feel it?

G: I should say we could.

P: Are you sure, or do you think that all we feel is its result?

G: Surely the essence of the wind is its result – trees bending, and clothes flapping about our ears – that is the wind, isn’t it?

P: I am not sure that our learned meteorologists would agree with you.

G: What would they have to say? They have only eyes and ears, the same as the rest of us.

P: But they surely have something more than us laymen – they have the knowledge of the wind, they have an understanding of what causes air to become unsettled so that we are compelled, when our hats blow off, to give it a name; wind.

G: And what is this knowledge they have that you or I do not have?

P: They have the understanding of the underlying cause of wind – they know why it blows, rather than merely that it blows or what effects it has when it blows. Those last two are given to us, through our sight, through our senses – the wind blows and trees bend – we can see it, so we mistake seeing for knowing.

The meteorologist, on the other hand, draws upon his knowledge of atmospheric pressures and how columns of air behave over land and over sea, and over hot land and cooler sea, and over cooler land and warmer sea. He understands the movements that are caused by this differential between heated air and cooled air, and from that knowledge, he can say things like, ‘If you are standing in the Northern hemisphere, and you have your back to the wind, the low pressure area is to your left.’

G: He can say all that just by feeling the wind at his back?

P: Just so. What do you feel when the wind is at your back?

G: Probably only that we will have rain before long.

P: And where does that knowledge come from?

G: Well, first of all, I do not know it is knowledge in the way you appear to be using the word, applied to meteorology, but I suppose that it comes from observation – that I usually observe that when the wind comes from a particular direction – say over that hill, yonder, that rain is not far away.

P: So you would say that your observation is based upon sight – upon your senses, at any rate?

G: Yes, I would, but there is surely something more involved.

P: What might that be?

G: That it is what our senses tell us as well as what we deduce from what our senses tell us.

P: What would you term this ‘something else’?

G: In part it is our memory, for without memory, how would we recall the steps to rain falling.

P: Yes, I will grant you that. Is there anything else?

G: Our power to reason too, though only slightly do we have to reason in this case; cause being followed so closely by effect; we deduce that there is a causal relationship.

P: It would be difficult to ignore it, would it not? But what of the causes the meteorologist defines in his observation of the wind at his back and the low pressure on his left in the Northern hemisphere. What of that? That can hardly be observed, and yet he is aware of it just as surely as he is that the wind is at his back.

G: I marvel at this kind of knowledge, based, not at all upon what can be sensed, but on something else – a working knowledge of how the very Earth spins in space and how the air is disposed about the Earth’s surface while it is spinning.

P: So you see now, or rather, you now understand, are aware of, shall I say, a kind of knowledge that is based, not purely upon the senses, but upon our powers to reason and suppose.

G: It is surely something connected with the imagination too, is it not, for if man can imagine, can suppose, he can check empirically that his suppositions are correct or be made to realize that they are wrong.

P: And he can learn from other sources than his senses, can he not?
Extract taken from www.rlfielding.com
Robert L. Fielding

Hi, my name's Rob Fielding. I teach academic writing at a university in he Middle East. Find my books, blogs and stuff on my website www.rlfielding.com
Thanks
Rob