By Olivia Lukacic
With Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, people around the work and in all areas of culture and study are changing their views on the earth and the land. Environmental ethics was not a phrase used often merely half a century ago, but now its influence has spread its reach into things from philosophy, to religion, to law. People are beginning to see and understand that everything has an ethical concern of how we, as a population, use the environment.
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The Land Ethic at the Turn of the Millennium published in Biodiversity and Conservation Journal examines how society and cultures are viewing nature and ecosystems and the ethics brought to them based around the ideas from Aldo Leopold’s the Land Ethic. For the authors, environmental ethics can be defined as the theory and practice about appropriate concern for, and values in, the natural world. Those that study environmental ethics and issues understand that humans are either helped or hindered by the condition of the environment in which they live, and there fore how important it’s survival is for humans survival.
What is needed moving forward in our society is a shift towards a bio-centric world, one with a respect for nature and a respect for life. We are still struggling with this switch as much of the world still has mainly anthropocentric ideals. Leopold thought of the land as part of the community. Even in his time, he said that “land is to be loved and respected as an extension of ethics.” In order for the global population to shift their goals from anthropocentric to bio-centric, ecosystems and natural communities need to be viewed as valuable. Leopold’s vision of ecosystem integrity and stability as the main principals of a land ethic. However this is a challenge to both scientists and philosophers. suddenly things become very multidimensional .
Moving forward, Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic still certainly carries a lot of weight. However Leopold touches on land as a more confined area, he mainly wrote about Sand County. But we realize that land and space are continues and our current land ethic needs to be looked at globally. No longer can we hope that what is being done will be isolated to that place. A much needed global scale must be brought into consideration.
Check out the full journal article!
http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hrolston/land-eth-millennium.pdf
Biodiversity and Conservation 9: 1045-1058, 2000.
© 2000 Kluwer Academic Publishers, Printed in the Netherlands.