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20 LAND ETHICS ~ Into Terra Incognita J Baird Callicott A new subdiscipline in philosophy called "environmental ethics" made its debut in the early 1970s in response to the realization, dawning over us in the previous decade, that the natural environment was in a state of crisis. I seem to have offered the first course in the subject at the University ofWisconsin-Stevens Point in 1971. A Sand County Almanacwas then practically the only text available for such a course (and a quarter century later it remains at the core of the syllabus for my current offering in the field). The first sentence of the first academic paper in the field, "Is There a Need for a New, an Environmental Ethic?," cited 'The Land Ethic."1 If that paper had been written by me, the fact would not be noteworthy. But it was written by Australian philosopher Richard Sylvan (then Routley) and presented to the Fifteenth World Congress ofPhilosophy in Varna, Bulgaria, in 1973. AIdo Leopold's ideas were steadily making their way into formal philosophical discourse in North America, Australia, and Europe. In retrospect, other amateur (I use this word not condescendingly, but more literally to indicate a nonprofessional labor of love) philosophers were also seminal in the eventual flowering forth ofacademic environmental ethics, most notably Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. But AIdo Leopold stands out even in this august company as steering environmental ethics into uncharted waters, or, to shift metaphors apropos the land ethic, into terra incognita. As Sylvan noted, Leopold envisioned an "ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it."2 This was, as Sylvan explained, virtually unprecedented in the annals of Western moral philosophy (and Sylvan had to extend his own expository powers to the utmostjust to articulate it). Heretofore all Western ethics had dealt exclusively with man's relation to his fellow man. If the land and the animals and plants that grow upon it had figured into such traditional ethics at all, it was as property or as the stage upon which the human morality play was acted out. AIdo Leopold made it possible for academic philosophers to imagine the possibility of a nonanthropocentric environmental ethic. 296 Land Ethics 297 Another feature of Leopold's vision of a land ethic was also foreign, if not to all previous Western ethics, at least to all the modern versions thereof. Modern moral philosophy is not only anthropocentric; it is concerned exclusively with human individuals-their rights, interests, happiness , and welfare-not with wholes. A society, community, state, or nation is a mere aggregate of individual human beings, the welfare or happiness of which is the sum total of that of the constituent persons. This is why many people steeped in the radical individualism of modern Western ethics can view Leopold as a hypocrite, since he was an unregenerate hunter. But Leopold, viewing land through the lens of ecology, thought of the integrity, stability, and beauty of a biotic community as something transcending the aggregate ofthe rights, interests, happiness, and welfare of the plants, animals, soils, and waters that compose it. The land ethic is, in a word, holistic as well as nonanthropocentric. According to the land ethic, the right of the individual member of the biotic community to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is subordinate to the integrity, stability, and beauty of the community as such. The land ethic, as Leopold sketched it, grants species the "right to continued existence," whereas a specimen warrants only respect. The lot of individual creatures is to "suck hard, live fast, and die often."~ To say, then, that Leopold has set an agenda for research in environmental ethics for decades, perhaps even centuries, to come would be no exaggeration. For centuries past, philosophers have been searching for reasons why we should morally enfranchise other human beings. Human beings are created in the image of God, we are uniquely rational, we are uniquely autonomous, we are presumptive signatories to an implicit social contract ... By what parity of reasoning should we morally enfranchise fellow members of the biotic community and the community as such? Leopold appears to advocate such an extension of ethics, and hints at how it might bejustified, but the complete brieffor a nonanthropocentric environmental ethic has yet to be filed. And when conflicts arise, why should the integrity, stability, and beauty ofthe biotic community trump the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness of one of its...

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