Comparative Anaylsis: Leopolds Land Ethic and Callicott's In Defense of the Land Ethic - Essay Example

Like a biocentric ethic, the prospect of an ecocentric ethic offers another in the anti-anthropocentric movement of moral dis Ecocentrism is, by its essence, a resistance to the dichotomous thinking which is typically presupposed in overtly anthropocentric moral reasoning. It does this by denying the division between human existence and non-human existence as anything ontologically significant. Among the claims of anthropocentrism that an ecocentrist would deny is that human beings alone possess a kind of intrinsic value (because of a special rational capacity) or that human beings possess a larger degree of value in comparison to non-human nature. In many ways, the ecocentric model follows that of biocentrism in calling for egalitarianism with respect to all nature. On this view, man is not a steward but a resident of the biotic community in which he lives. Leopold’s so-called “Land Ethic” is truly the basis of what we might call ethical ecocentrism, and it is precisely the concept of “community” that he hopes to alter to encompass all things in nature, and not just the special place given to human beings with respect to the land they inhabit and animals they occupy it with. To Leopold, how we treat our environment in the modern age is no different from how Odysseus treats his slave-girls after his return. “Land,” Leopold says, “like Odysseus’ slave-girls, is still property. The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations” (Leopold, 1998, p. 117). A shift to an ecocentric, or land-based, ethic requires of us a complete reconceptualization or retooling of our moral language. It requires an entirely new relationship of man to his environment in all aspects of his existence. To Leopold, “Land-use ethics are still governed wholly by economic self-interest, just as social ethics were a century ago” (Leopold, 1998, p. 119). In this respect, values are displaced: instead of valuing the land as we should, we think of value merely in terms of the valuer and his interest in the object. The system of conservation “based solely on economic self-interest is hopelessly lopsided. It tends to ignore, and thus eventually to eliminate, many elements in the land community that lack commercial value, but are (as far as we know) essential to its healthy functioning” (Leopold, 1998, p. 120). The problem which arises is exactly this: what of the elements of non-human nature which lack the economic value of entire communities—even lifeless entities like the sand dunes of deserts or the marshes of bogs? In response, Leopold proposes his conception of “the land pyramid”, a notion of nature which overcomes the obvious inadequacies of language like “the balance of nature”. Instead, “the land pyramid” takes into account the fact that nature is hierarchically structured and any responsibility to nature takes the form of respecting the complex flows of energies between organic beings, including the soil, plants, herbivores, and carnivores. At the bottom of such a pyramid, we find these lower energy producers, followed by insect layers, rodent layers, and so on, until we reach “the apex layer” consisting of larger carnivores (Leopold, 1998, p. 121). It is man’s responsibility, in the ecocentric ethic, to respect all aspects of the pyramid, all of the way down to the waters that industry pollutes. Polluting the water directly affects all levels of the pyramid, excluding “the plants and animals necessary to keep energy in circulation” (Leopold, 1998, p. 121). Leopold’s land pyramid is predicated on the flowing of this energy through all layers of the hierarchy, and that one layer may feed off another. The standard of value in this ethical framework states that an act is right, or morally good, if and only if it tends to conserve the inherent beauty, integrity, and stability of the biotic community through the land pyramid. A major part of Leopold’s defense of the land ethic is the reconceptualization of the ethical community itself, which is a topic developed further by Leopold’s longtime defender J. Baird Callicott in his “The Conceptual Foundations of the Land Ethic”. Leopold describes the “sequence of ethics” in the opening of his piece, alluding firstly to the Homeric picture of treating slave-girls as property, and then to the fellow-feeling that man feels today to members of his own species. The next step in the sequence is to a universal humanity, and an expansion of the “community concept”. For Leopold, “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundary of the community to include soils, water, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land” (Leopold, 1998, p. 117). Callicott reiterates Leopold’s point from an earlier work that offered a view of the “community” as the fundamental, or basic, concept of ecology. It is the ecological viewpoint that the author attempts to draw out and merge with an anti-anthropomorphic ethic. Callicott says, “Once land is popularly perceived as a biotic community—as it is professionally perceived in ecology—a correlative land ethic will emerge in the collective cultural consciousness” (Callicott, 1998, p. 127). Callicott, both in his essay and in his book entitled “In Defense of the Land Ethic”, draws the obvious connection between Leopold’s fundamental concept of community and the Darwinian tradition of emphasizing close-knit communities for the propagation of genes similar in character. The account is also closely correlated with the Scottish philosophic notion of ethical sentimentalism. Leopold’s ethics attempts not only to ground a moral code in evolutionary biology, but also to find its origin in it as well. From the Darwinian structure of the science, we find that the content of the ethics reflects the moral sentiments of the community or society. As Callicott notes, “Ethics and society or community are correlative. This single, simple principle constitutes a powerful tool for the analysis of moral natural history…” (Callicott, 1998, p. 126). In chapter seven of his book “In Defense of the Land Ethic”, Callicott defends Leopold’s Land Ethic against Hume’s fork. How do we derive, in the land ethic, a normative principle from a factual one? We do so from the Darwinian notion of kinship, which Leopold described as, “that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us by this time a sense of kinship… with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over the magnitude and duration of the biotic enterprise” (Callicott, 1989, p. 125). It is a small conceptual jump that we make from the Darwinian and ecological community to the concept of a biotic community. Leopold makes note that ecology represents the entirety of living nature as this biotic community, or, alternatively, as a society of living and nonliving natural material. Present day ecology, and biology, conceives of the biotic community as systematically integrated in a holistic fashion. There are no independent sets of entities in the context of the entire biotic community. Instead, the egalitarianism that Leopold advocates for in his land ethic stands as a new basis for ethics. Avoiding Hume’s fork is as easy as recognizing that the environment and the study of it in ecology can change human values and therefore change human sentiments. When this occurs, the shape of ethics changes and ecocentrism is made possible. Callicott concludes by saying, “[Ecology] reveals new relations among objects which, once revealed, stir our ancient centers of moral feeling” (Callicott, 1989, p. 127). Aldo Leopold developed and defended a version of ecocentrism that places not only the sum of life at the center of moral concern, but all of the elements of nature which facilitate and make life itself possible. Nevertheless, “the land” is so much more than soil and water: it is the energy flow from the lowest level of “the land pyramid” to the top. The hierarchical structure of nature, however, does not give us license to attribute any greater value to one level than to another: all things in nature are equally valuable. Leopold’s egalitarianism in this respect has striking implications for the general concept of a “community”—a concept instrumental to his view. The community in the Darwinian sense shapes the moral foundations of individual acts. There is no exception with the biotic community, or with the whole of nature. Works Cited Callicott, J. B. (1989). In Defense of the Land Ethic: Essays in Environmental Philosophy. New York: State University of New York Press. Callicott, J. B. (1998). The Conceptual Foundations of the Land Ethic. In L. Pojman, Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory and Application (2nd Edition ed., pp. 124-133). London: Wadsworth Publishing Company. Leopold, A. (1998). Ecocentrism: The Land Ethic. In L. Pojman, Environmental Ethics: Readings in Theory and Application (2nd Edition ed., pp. 117-123). London: Wadsworth Publishing Company. Read More