Leopold: The Land Ethic

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Leopold: Loving the Land

Some notes on his Land Ethic (e-text linked here).

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

Wendell Berry’s ideas the love and culture and beauty matter in an ethical (and not just scientific) understanding of nature are connected to Aldo Leopold, a prominent figure in early 20th century environmental writing.

Overall questions:

Can writing (or broadly the arts/works of the imagination) be viewed as biotic or ecological? How—from Leopold’s perspective? From yours?

And reverse question: Can the biotic community or an ecosystem or land be viewed in terms of art, aesthetics, writing, imagination? Do they share principles (call them ‘ethics’) with the arts and writing?

It seems to me Leopold argues yes to the second: that the biotic must be viewed in part in terms of aesthetics/culture, if we are to think of it properly. And that the first question is yes—and that his writing demonstrates this in points—and later writers such as Wendell Berry take this up more directly: only culture can save nature.

For context: such relations between the sciences and the arts/poetry/philosophy not common in our split of ‘two cultures,’ but is so of 19^th c natural philosophy, such as with Thoreau. So, Leopold in part critical of an academic science that needs to remember some lessons from its past, where ethics and aesthetics were part of its focus.

Land Ethic

• Compares/analogizes ecology with philosophy/ethics—suggests that the extension of ethics to ecology/land is actually an ecological evolution (238)
  • Why connect/compare ecology (biotic) with philosophy/humanities—and ultimately, aesthetics, the ethics of art? Key for Leopold is community—and the implication is that the community concept (individual is member of community of interdependent parts) needs to be understood by more than science and biology or ecology. In fact, that it needs to be understood in part through what he refers to as intellect and love and aesthetics. (246)
    • Also in Foreword (xix): an ‘esthetic’ and ‘cultural harvest’ we can/need to reap from the land, but has been forgotten (and lost by the Abrahamicview of land as commodity)
      • So, community as a term for beauty, culture, intellect, spirit—in contrast with ‘commodity’: why and how?
      • Think communion? Communication?
• So what are some lessons in “community” and “interdependence” and love/feeling can we learn from the aesthetic experience?
  • In what ways can an experience with a writer (novel or poem or argument) or artist (painting, film, photograph) be compared to ecology or to a biotic community? What makes it “ecological”?
    • Think of the energy circuit he discusses: can this be connected to reading, writing, or viewing art?
  • Read as example: Marshland Elegy.
  • • Lesson from Berry: solving for pattern—similar issues in patterns, symbolic representation of any sort built on patterns (from basic level of language to sophisticated level of design)
    • Chris Jordan?
  • To reverse this, then: what are some “ethics” or principles or characteristics of the aesthetic experience that Leopold feels are missing from conservation and the “environmental studies” of his day? Can we identify any of these ethics in Leopold’s writing? Are there other writers/artists we might find these ethics evident? What are examples of Leopold’s communication/communion/community in his writing?
    • His use of literary references: odyssey, homer; allusion

 

One writer to compare: Wendell Berry (preserving wildness; his vision of the loving economy [523]—and indivisibility of natural and cultural

[perhaps the key reason why for Leopold the ecological perspective must be aesthetic/ethical, humanistic—because as Berry suggests, only the cultural/human can save the natural (since only the cultural can destroy it).

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