Is the Land Ethic Still Relevant?

by Craig Maier

In an era when dinner comes from Drive Thru and heat comes from an electronic, programmable thermostat, is the Land Ethic still useful? There’s no doubt that healthy and prosperous communities cannot thrive without healthy and diverse ecosystems, but in a society that has grown increasingly urban and affluent, can Leopold’s beautiful prose and insightful rhetoric still accomplish the real work of transforming attitudes and values about people and land?

In April, the Leopold Conference gathered leading scientists, scholars, and educators to grapple with these questions, which are essential to anyone who draws inspiration and ethical insight from the life and work of Aldo Leopold. Envisioned by the late Luna Leopold, the Leopold Conference gathered participants at the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center, allowing them to come together in environs rich with connections to Leopold and the natural world.

Co-chaired by Susan Flader and Gene Likens, chairperson of the Aldo Leopold Foundation’s Board of Directors and a former director respectively, the conference engaged 10 conservation leaders as well as Leopold siblings Nina, Carl, and Estella.

“A Sand County Almanac is really timeless,” commented Walter Reid, director of the Conservation and Science Program of The David and Lucile Packard Foundation. “I believe Leopold’s work applies to a remarkable extent,” Reid said during the conference’s reporting session, noting that Leopold addressed both “our ethical and moral responsibility to nature” as well as “the role of nature in human society.”

The task now at hand, the Leopold Conference reported, is to build and broaden understanding of those principles, so that the Land Ethic will come alive in society. Part of the effort lies in crafting language and developing outreach tools that are firmly rooted in Leopold’s philosophy and yet resonate in the Information Age—informing and inspiring a generation that grew up largely buffered from intimate experiences in nature, and instead plugged into electronic media and ever-present commercial marketing.

Coinciding with the launch of the Aldo Leopold Legacy Center, the Leopold Conference strongly affirmed the Aldo Leopold Foundation’s mission and strengthened its network of supporters as the organization continues to develop programming and partnerships that will weave the Land Ethic into the social fabric of the 21st Century.