Aldo Leopold Legacy Center
The Land Ethic: A Timeless Challenge
Often, people come to us asking, “How can I reduce my impact on the environment?”
The Leopold Center is, in part, the result of attempting to answer that question. At heart, the Leopold Center attempts to answer the essential question—“How can we ensure both people and the land will prosper in the long run?"
Leopold defined conservation as a way of life in which land does well for its inhabitants, citizens do well by their land, and both end up better by reason of partnership. Aldo Leopold recognized that no matter how sophisticated we become, people will always depend on the land—“the land” being shorthand for the community that not only includes and values people but also plants, animals, soils, and waters, from the highest strata of the atmosphere to the depths of the ocean. We often take natural resources and ecosystems for granted, but, ultimately, the planet’s natural communities and natural functions are what sustain our economy and enrich our lives. “That land is a community,” Leopold wrote, “is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.”
From the beginning, the Land Ethic guided design of the Leopold Center. The center not only meets the highest standards of the U.S. Green Building Council, but also sustains the health, wildness, and productivity of the land, locally and globally. It is a place to learn about Leopold’s intimate, life-long relationship with the American landscape and see his ideas put into practice.
“Drawing on his life-long study of ecology, land use, history, and ethics, Aldo Leopold concluded that the highest task of civilization was to figure out how ‘to live on a piece of land without spoiling it.’ It’s an ideal articulated by one of the greatest thinkers of the 20th Century, an ideal we must embrace in this one." - Buddy Huffaker, ALF Executive Director
Learn more about Leopold’s Land Ethic here.