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The Conservation Ethic [1933] While he was advising on soil erosion in the Southwest, Leopold delivered the fourth annual John Wesley Powell Lecture to the Southwestern Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Las Cruces, New Mexico. It was the most important address of his career and his most comprehensive statement to date of the ethical aspects of conservation. Fifteen years later, Leopold reworked portions of the address, which had been published in the Journal ofForestry, for incorporation into "The Land Ethic," the capstone essay of Sand County Almanac. But "The Conservation Ethic," which was widely read and frequently cited, remains a vitally significant milepost in Leopold's intellectual development. When god-like Odysseus returned from the wars in Troy, he hanged all on one rope some dozen slave-girls of his household whom he suspected of misbehavior during his absence. This hanging involved no question of propriety, much less of justice. The girls were property. The disposal ofproperty was then, as now, a matter of expediency, not of right and wrong. Criteria of right and wrong were not lacking from Odysseus' Greece: witness the fidelity of his wife through the long years before at last his blackprowed galleys clove the wine-dark seas for home. The ethical structure of that day covered wives, but had not yet been extended to human chattels. During the three thousand years which have since elapsed, ethical criteria have been extended to many fields of conduct, with corresponding shrinkages in those judged by expediency only. This extension of ethics, so far studied only by philosophers, is actually a process in ecological evolution. Its sequences may be described in biological as well as philosophical terms. An ethic, biologically, is a limitation on freedom ofaction in the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct. These are two definitions of one thing. The thing has its origin in the tendency of interdependent individuals or societies to evolve modes of cooperation. The biologist calls 181 182 The Conservation Ethic these symbioses. Man elaborated certain advanced symbioses called politics and economics. Like their simpler biological antecedents, they enable individuals or groups to exploit each other in an orderly way. Their first yardstick was expediency. The complexity of coOperative mechanisms increased with population density, and with the efficiency of tools. It was simpler, for example, to define the antisocial uses of sticks and stones in the days of the mastodons than of bullets and billboards in the age of motors. At a certain stage of complexity, the human community found expediency -yardsticks no longer sufficient. One by one it has evolved and superimposed upon them a set of ethical yardsticks. The first ethics dealt with the relationship between individuals. The Mosaic Decalogue is an example. Later accretions dealt with the relationship between the individual and society . Christianity tries to integrate the individual to society, Democracy to integrate social organization to the individual. There is as yet no ethic dealing with man's relationship to land and to the non-human animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus ' slave-girls, is still property. The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations. The extension of ethics to this third element in human environment is, ifwe read evolution correctly, an ecological possibility. It is the third step in a sequence. The first two have already been taken. Civilized man exhibits in his own mind evidence that the third is needed. For example, his sense of right and wrong may be aroused quite as strongly by the desecration of a nearby woodlot as by a famine in China, a near-pogrom in Germany, or the murder ofthe slave-girls in ancient Greece. Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekial and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong. Society, however, has not yet affirmed their belief. I regard the present conservation movement as the embryo ofsuch an affirmation . I here discuss why this is, or should be, so. Some scientists will dismiss this matter forthwith, on the ground that ecology has no relation to right and wrong. To such I reply that science, if not philosophy, should by now have made us cautious about dismissals. An ethic may be regarded as a mode of guidance for meeting ecological situations so new or intricate, or involving such deferred reactions, that the path of social expediency is not discernible to the...

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