From Leopold's Desk

Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest

Conservation as a Moral Issue

Excerpted from: “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest,” Aldo Leopold, 1923

Thus far we have considered the problem of conservation of land purely as an economic issue. A false front of exclusively economic determinism is so habitual to Americans in discussing public questions that one must speak in the language of compound interest to get a hearing. In my opinion, however, one can not round out a real understanding of the situation in the Southwest without likewise considering its moral aspects.

In past and more outspoken days conservation was put in terms of decency rather than dollars. Who can not feel the moral scorn and contempt for poor craftsmanship in the voice of Ezekiel when he asks: Seemeth it a small thing unto you to have fed upon good pasture, but ye must tread down with your feet the residue of your pasture? And to have drunk of the clear waters, but ye must foul the residue with your feet?

In these two sentences may be found an epitome of the moral question involved. Ezekiel seems to scorn waste, pollution, and unnecessary damage as something unworthy—as something damaging not only to the reputation of the waster, but to the self-respect of the craft and the society of which he is a member. We might even draw from his words a broader concept—that the privilege of possessing the earth entails the responsibility of passing it on, the better for our use, not only to immediate posterity, but to the Unknown Future, the nature of which is not given us to know. It is possible that Ezekiel respected the soil, not only as a craftsman respects his material, but as a moral being respects a living thing.

Many of the world’s most penetrating minds have regarded our so-called “inanimate nature” as a living thing, and probably many of us who have neither the time nor the ability to reason out conclusions on such matters by logical processes have felt intuitively that there existed between man and the earth a closer and deeper relation than would necessarily follow the mechanistic conception of the earth as our physical provider and abiding place.

Of course, in discussing such matters we are beset on all sides with the pitfalls of language. The very words living thing have an inherited and arbitrary meaning derived not from reality, but from human perceptions of human affairs. But we must use them for better or for worse.

A good expression of this conception of an organized animate nature is given by the Russian philosopher Ouspensky, who presents the following analogy:

Were we to observe, from the inside, one cubic centimetre of the human body, knowing nothing of the existence of the entire body and of man himself, then the phenomena going on in this little cube of flesh would seem like elemental phenomena in inanimate nature.

Fire scarred tree in the Animas Mountains. Photo by Curt Meine.

He then states that it is at least not impossible to regard the earth’s parts—soil, mountains, rivers, atmosphere, etc.—as organs, or parts of organs, of a coordinated whole, each part with a definite function. And, if we could see this whole, as a whole, through a great period of time, we might perceive not only organs with coordinated functions, but possibly also that process of consumption and replacement which in biology we call the metabolism, or growth. In such a case we would have all the visible attributes of a living thing, which we do not now realize to be such because it is too big, and its life processes too slow. And there would also follow that invisible attribute—a soul, or consciousness—which not only Ouspensky, but many philosophers of all ages, ascribe to all living things and aggregations thereof, including the “dead” earth.

There is not much discrepancy, except in language, between this conception of a living earth, and the conception of a dead earth, with enormously slow, intricate, and interrelated functions among its parts, as given us by physics, chemistry, and geology. The essential thing for present purposes is that both admit the interdependent functions of the elements. But “anything indivisible is a living being,” says Ouspensky. Possibly, in our intuitive perceptions, which may be truer than our science and less impeded by words than our philosophies, we realize the indivisibility of the earth—its soil, mountains, rivers, forests, climate, plants, and animals, and respect it collectively not only as a useful servant but as a living being, vastly less alive than ourselves in degree, but vastly greater than ourselves in time and space—a being that was old when the morning stars sang together, and, when the last of us has been gathered unto his fathers, will still be young.

Philosophy, then, suggests one reason why we can not destroy the earth with moral impunity; namely, that the “dead” earth is an organism possessing a certain kind and degree of life, which we intuitively respect as such. Possibly, to most men of affairs, this reason is too intangible to either accept or reject as a guide to human conduct. But philosophy also offers another and more easily debatable question: was the earth made for man’s use, or has man merely the privilege of temporarily possessing an earth made for other and inscrutable purposes? The question of what he can properly do with it must necessarily be affected by this question.

Most religions, insofar as I know, are premised squarely on the assumption that man is the end and purpose of creation, and that not only the dead earth, but all creatures thereon, exist solely for his use. The mechanistic or scientific philosophy does not start with this as a premise, but ends with it as a conclusion, and hence may be placed in the same category for the purpose in hand. This high opinion of his own importance in the universe Jeanette Marks stigmatizes as “the great human impertinence.” John Muir, in defense of rattlesnakes, protests: “. . . as if nothing that does not obviously make for the benefit of man had any right to exist; as if our ways were God’s ways.” But the noblest expression of this anthropomorphism is Bryant’s “Thanatopsis”:

...The hills
Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun—the vales
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods—rivers that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks
That make the meadows green, and, poured round all
Old oceans gray and melancholy waste—
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man.

Since most of mankind today profess either one of the anthropomorphic religions or the scientific school of thought which is likewise anthropomorphic, I will not dispute the point. It just occurs to me, however, in answer to the scientists, that God started his show a good many million years before he had any men for audience—a sad waste of both actors and music—and in answer to both, that it is just barely possible that God himself likes to hear birds sing and see flowers grow. But here again we encounter the insufficiency of words as symbols for realities.

Granting that the earth is for man—there is still a question: what man? Did not the cliff dwellers who tilled and irrigated these our valleys think that they were the pinnacle of creation—that these valleys were made for them? Undoubtedly. And then the Pueblos? Yes. And then the Spaniards? Not only thought so, but said so. And now we Americans? Ours beyond a doubt! (How happy a definition is that one of Hadley’s which states, “Truth is that which prevails in the long run”!).

Five races—five cultures—have flourished here. We may truthfully say of our four predecessors that they left the earth alive, undamaged. Is it possibly a proper question for us to consider what the sixth shall say about us? If we are logically anthropomorphic, yes. We and

. . . all that tread
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom. Take the wings
Of morning; pierce the Barcan wilderness
Or lose thyself in the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound
Save his own dashings—yet the dead are there,
And millions in those solitudes, since first
The flight of years began, have laid them down
In their last sleep.

And so, in time, shall we. And if there be, indeed, a special nobility inherent in the human race—a special cosmic value, distinctive from and superior to all other life—by what token shall it be manifest?
By a society decently respectful of its own and all other life, capable of inhabiting the earth without defiling it? Or by a society like that of John Burroughs’ potato bug, which exterminated the potato, and thereby exterminated itself? As one or the other shall we be judged in “the derisive silence of eternity.”

A Note on the Text by Susan Flader

A quarter century before “The Land Ethic,” Leopold had attempted an integrated statement of his conservation philosophy in an essay titled “Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest.” The essay presents Leopold’s analysis of the deterioration of organic resources in the Southwest, together with an assessment of economic implications, and concludes with a discussion of “conservation as a moral issue.” It is perhaps the most significant of Leopold’s unpublished manuscripts, for he was not to address the ethical question again for a decade, and then in a strikingly different manner.

“Some Fundamentals” was broader than Leopold’s previous writings, not only in its consideration of a range of organic and mineral resources, but also in its more extensive discussion of the causes of erosion and it its demonstration of man’s responsibility for conservative land use. In brief, Leopold argued that climatic change had not been a factor in the deterioration of organic resources in the Southwest in historic times but that the nature of the climate, characterized by periodic drought, had resulted in a delicately balanced equilibrium that was easily upset by man. In a challenge to traditional Forest Service dogma, he maintained that grazing was a much more destructive element than either fire or logging.

Leopold’s extensive discussion of climate and his dismissal of climatic change as a factor of erosion seemed intended to establish man’s responsibility, not only as against the geologic view of erosion as a natural world-building process but also as against the popular conception of destructive erosion as an “act of God.” His treatment of conservation as a moral issue was certainly an outgrowth of his belief that man must bear responsibility for much of the destruction wrought by erosion and for ameliorating its effects by conservative land use.

The most significant source for Leopold’s discussion of conservation as a moral issue in “Some Fundamentals” was probably P. D. Ouspensky’s Tertium Organum. Although Leopold’s personal copy is dated 1925, the work was translated from the Russian in 1920 and created quite a stir in the United States, going through two editions and several printings in the early twenties. Leopold was most taken with Ouspensky’s notion of consciousness as an attribute of all material, inorganic as well as organic. Tertium Organum provided a philosophic rationale and terminology for the functional interrelatedness of soils, waters, climate, plants, and animals that Leopold had always intuitively sensed. Leopold undoubtedly noted the harmony of Ouspensky’s organic philosophy also with the naturalistic philosophy of John Burroughs in Accepting the Universe (1920). With the combined support of Ouspensky and Burroughs, Leopold in “Some Fundamentals” confronted the religious question of man’s relationship to the earth—whether as master or plain citizen—more directly than anywhere else in his writings.

Susan Flader chairs the Board of Directors for the Aldo Leopold Foundation. She has written extensively about Leopold and his land ethic philosophy. Her comments originally appeared as an introduction to “Some Fundamentals” in Environmental Ethics journal.