Why we don't follow a land ethic

Aldo Leopold’s discussion about the need for a land ethic, a social construct that would force people to consider land not as a resource to be exploited, but as “a citizen of it”, is a concept that has been noted for sometime (Leopold, 240). Given that Leopold wrote about this land ethic in 1949, when A Sand County Almanac was first published, it is safe to assume that Leopold may have been among the first to recognize the need for mankind to cease looking at land as an economic engine alone and begin to consider it as something beyond us, an entity that we depend upon to such a great extent that its maintenance must come before other concerns.

Whether Leopold was among the first to make such an argument, or even the question of if the argument is correct, is irrelevant. What is relevant is the fact that the argument has been made before. The message has come in several forms. Its defined the criticism of the American desire to “grow” discussed in Herman Daly’s Beyond Growth: The Economics of Sustainable Development. Ian McHarg used similar arguments throughout the 1960’s in his criticisms of the urban environs of his day. Even Terrance Malick’s recent film The Tree of Life with its juxtaposition of beautiful natural processes in seemingly endless space to the urban environment of New York (actually Houston) which was represented as claustrophobic and cold, could be argued as a further extension on this theory. Clearly, with so many able to express this opinion, such views are known. The important question becomes “Why have we, as humans, failed to respond to such criticisms of our treatment of land?”

Urban planner William Rees attempted to explain this unwillingness to change in his essay The Human Nature of Unsustainability. He argues that humans have observed over time that exploiting land has benefitted survival, that the owner ship of larger lots correlates positively with the ability to live comfortably and procreate. As I have read about the history of land use, Rees points have served as one of the few practical musings on the manner in which humans view land. Treating the desire to use land as an instinct rather than a breach in morals, he places the behavior on the nature side of the nature versus nurture divide, it is a behavior that we have little control over. The learned behavior, in this instance, is the curtailment of this innate desire to grow.

Is learning to curtail an innate desire to grow possible? Personally, I believe it is possible to change this growth behavior; however, I believe that real progress will not be made until it is a necessity blind to no one. I do believe a point will be reached at which growth is no longer unsustainable, but directly detrimental. A period of time in which human innovation will not be able to mask the reality that there are not enough resources to support further growth without subsequent losses in the very sectors that we measure this growth. Unfortunately, until we reach this carrying capacity, there is little reason to believe that humans will begin to view land as people like Aldo Leopold have been suggesting for over 60 years.