Blog 3- A Sand County Almanac

Aldo Leopold was an activists for the worth of all living things, he supported the value that humans had to manage and protect wild lands. In this selection Leopold speaks of an ethical relationship between humans, animals, and the land.

A mountain is home for many creatures, from wolves to bunnies, from squirrels to deer. The diversity of an ecosystem is important as everything is interrelated to each other. A mountain can support many kinds of species but could not sustain itself if one of these animals exceeded in population.

Leopold remembers when he was a child and he seen a wolf before him, he had a trigger itch because he thought that since less wolves meant more deer, then no wolves would mean a hunter's paradise. He sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.

Since then Leopold has lived to see state after state extirpate their wolves, he has seen many wolfless mountains, with this came many mountain slopes have a surplus of deer trails. He has seen bush and foliage grazed, and trees defoliated. In the end this has lead to starved deer bones dead of its own too-much. Leopold has then suspected whether deer live mortal fear wolves, or if a mountain lives in mortal fear of its deer. It is the wolf's job of trimming the deer or herd populations.

We all live to want safety, prosperity, comfort, long life, and dullness. However this is achieved it all comes to the same thing peace in our mind.

Politics and economics are no longer competition, it is replaced by ethical co-operative mechanisms. These mechanisms are becoming more complexe as population density increases. Ethics in politics and economics deals with relations between individual, it then tries to integrate social organization to the individual. Yet there is no ethic relating man to land or to the animals and to plants. Land is still property, it is a priviledge not an obligation. Land stripping is not only unwise it is wrong, yet society still does not believe this. Such example to prove this would be the present conservation movement.

All these ethics evolve to be that the individual is part of an interdendant system. Instincts promt humand to compete but ethics prompt us to co-operate. Land ethics is simply including soils, waters, plants, and animals.

Our economy is heading away from land consciouness rather than toward it. Humans have no relation to land, to him it is simple space between cities where food grows. Most humans are bored when outside a city, unless it involves golf courses. Land or natural things is something humans have outgrown.

It is right to think of preserving integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it thinks toward a economical perspective.

The evolution of a land ethic is an intellectual and emotional process. Conservation has good intentions but are still in need of understanding the land and moving away from an economic land-use. Our present problem is that of attitudes and implementations.