From the Aldo Leopold Land Ethic to the Rachel Carson Sea Ethic

for The Future of Marine Biodiversity: the Known, the Unknown, and the Unknowable

organized by Center of Marine Biodiversity Scripps Institution of Oceanography

on April 22, 2005

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (LZW) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

by J. Baird Callicott

Visiting Professor of PhilosophyVisiting Professor of Forestry and Environmental StudiesBioethicist-in-ResidenceYale University 2004-2005

Professor of Philosophy and Religion StudiesInstitute of Applied SciencesUniversity of North Texas

research assisted byElyssa BackSchool of ManagementYale University

&Priscilla Solis YbarraDepartment of EnglishRice University

A UNT Department of Philosophy Initiative Irene Klaver, Director

Aldo Leopold (1887-1948)

his “land ethic” the ethic-of-choice among contemporary environmentalists and conservation biologists

based on evolutionary biologyand ecology

“changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it . . .implies respect for fellow members and also for the community as such”

Can the Leopold land ethic be transposed from the terrestrial environment (in and for which it was conceived) to the marine environment?

that is,Can the land ethic double as a sea ethic?

Yes and No

Yes—to the extent that we can find the kind of biotic communities with which we can relate as plain members and citizens.

No—to the extent that the marine environment is alien,“other,” and “different”

The land ethic may be complemented by an autonomoussea ethic first suggested by Rachel Carson in Under the Sea Wind

The conceptual foundations of the Leopold land ethicborrowed from Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man

“No tribe could hold together if murder, robbery,treachery &c. were common; hence such crimes,within the limits of the same tribe, are ‘branded with everlasting infamy.’”

If the “tribe” cannot hold together—> memberswould perish / fail to reproduce.

Ethics evolved by natural selection as a means to social organization Vital to the inclusive fitness of individual members.

Raw material for the evolution of society: mammalian parental and filial affections + social instincts and sympathy

Expanded by natural selection to siblings, uncles, aunts, cousins, etc. to create the human ur-society

The conceptual foundations of the Leopold land ethicborrowed from Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man

Ethics proper emerges when Homo sapiens acquires:

(1) intelligence: trace the causal sequence from action to effect on society

(2) imagination: envision the effect on society of similar actions

(3) language: codify prohibitions on anti-social actions

LEMMA: Ethics and society (community) are correlative

COROLLARY: As society evolves, ethics evolve in parallel

The conceptual foundations of the Leopold land ethicborrowed from Charles Darwin’s Descent of Man

Extended family (clan) — Self-sacrifice

Tribe — Gift economy

Nation — Property rights

Nation state — Patriotism

Global village — Universal human rights

“As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races”

To this Darwinian foundation, Leopold added an ecological ingredient borrowed from Charles Elton

(1900-1991)

QuickTime™ and aTIFF (LZW) decompressor

are needed to see this picture.

The community paradigm the biota is organized like human societies

each plant and animal occupies a niche, a role or profession in the economy of nature

Darwin in a nutshell: “All ethics so far evolved rest on a single premise: that the individualis a member of a community of interdependent

parts. His instincts prompt him to compete for his place in thatcommunity, but his ethics prompt him also to cooperate”

The Eltonian ingredient: Ecology “simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.”

Some implications of the Leopold land ethic

All species “should continue as a matter of biotic right regardless of . . . economic advantage to us.”

“No special interest has a right to exterminatethem for the sake of a benefit, real or fancied, toitself.”

We must evince “love, respect, and admiration forland, and a high regard for its value. By value, Iof course mean something far broader than mereeconomic value, I mean value in the philosophicalsense.”—that is, intrinsic value.

The Golden Rule of the Land Ethic: “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.”

Can the Leopold land ethic be transposed from the terrestrial environment (in and for which it was conceived) to the marine environment?

that is,Can the land ethic double as a sea ethic?

Yes—to the extent that we can find the kind of biotic communities with which we can relate as plain members and citizens.

And fellow-members that we can love, respect, andadmire

Can the Leopold land ethic be transposed from the terrestrial environment (in and for which it was conceived) to the marine environment?

that is,Can the land ethic double as a sea ethic?

No—to the extent that the marine environment is alien, “other,” and “different”

The land ethic may be complemented by an autonomous sea ethic first suggested by Rachel Carson in Under the Sea Wind

Rachel Carson (1907-1964)

Silent Spring (1962) launched the modern American environmental movement

evinces ethical concern for human healthecosystem healthspecies preservation

Pre-Silent Spring, Carson a best-selling author of ocean-oriented books

Under the Sea Wind (1941)

The Sea Around Us (1951)

The Edge of the Sea (1955)

Like the Leopold land ethic, Carson sea ethic also erected on Darwinian footing—but Darwin of Origin of Species, not Descent of Man

Carson emphasizes competition and individual life-death struggle for survival

“The taste of blood was in the water. As though maddened by it, the bluefish slashed to right and left. They drove through the center of the anchovy school, scattering the ranks of the smaller fish so that they darted in panic and confusion in every direction. Many dashed to the surface and leaped through into the strange element beyond. There they were seized by the hovering gulls, companion fishers of the bluefish. “

Evolutionary Foundations of the Carson Sea Ethic

“Of the millions of mackerel eggs . . . thousands went no farther than the first stages of the journey into life until they were seized and eaten by the comb jellies, to be speedily converted into the watery tissue of their foe and in this re-incarnation to roam the sea, preying on their own kind.”

Like Raymond Lindeman’s energy flow and materials cycle

Ecosystemic Foundations of the Carson Sea Ethic

Ecological Foundations of the Carson Sea Ethic

“Each of the roe fish would shed in a season more than a hundred thousand eggs. From these perhaps only one or two young would survive the perils of river and sea and return to spawn, for by such ruthless selection the species is kept in check.” Like Lotka-Volterra Logistic-equation of population equilibria

Pioneer Limnologist, Stephen Forbes, possible influence“In this lake, . . . competitions are fierce and continuous beyond any parallels in the worst periods of human history; . . . they take hold, not on goods of life merely, but always upon life itself; . . . mercy and charity and sympathy and magnanimity and all the virtues are utterly unknown; . . . robbery and murder and the deadly tyranny of strength over weakness are the unvarying rule; what we call wrongdoing is always triumphant, and what we call goodness would be fatal to its possessor.” —”The Lake as a Microcosm” (1887)

But what is bad for the individual is good for the whole

“Out of these hard conditions an order has been evolved which is best conceivable without a total change in the conditions themselves; an equilibrium has been reached and is steadily maintained that actually accomplishes for all the parties involved the greatest good which the circumstances will at all permit. In a system where life is the universal good, but the destruction of life the well-nigh universal occupation, an order has spontaneously arisen which consistently tends to maintain life at the highest limit.”

Most traditional Western ethics based on sameness: finding commonality

All humans are created in the image of God—religion-based ethics

All humans are rational—classical philosophy-based ethics

All humans are brothers and sisters under the skin—Civil Rights ethic

All vertebrate animals are sentient—animal rights ethic

All organisms have interests and goods of their own—biocentric ethic

Humans, plants, animals, soils, waters are equally members of the same biotic community—Leopold land ethic

A new “Post-modern” movement in Western ethics advocates ethics based on otherness and difference

One source: philosopher Immanuel Levinas (1905-1995) and his concept of the “Other”

Another source: anti-Liberal feminists, e.g., Luce Irigaray (1930-)

Ethics based on sameness can exert pressure toconform, assimilate, measure up to the normrepresented by the paradigm case—the masculine norm (for oppositional feminism), the Western norm (for oppositional cultures), the white/anglo norm (for oppositional ethnicities),the human norm for (oppositional environmental ethics)

Henry Beston (1888-1968) an acknowledged influence on Rachel Carson

“We need another and a wiser and perhaps a more mystical concept of animals. . . . We patronize them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate of having taken form so far below ourselves. And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal shall not be measured by man. In a world older and more complete than ours they move finished and complete, gifted with extensions of the senses we have lost or never attained, living by voices

we shall never hear. They are not brethren, they are not underlings; they are other nations. Caught with ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners of the splendor and travail of the earth.”

—Outermost House (1929)

Henry Beston an acknowledged influence

“And what of Nature itself, you say—that callous and cruel engine, red in tooth and fang? . . . It is true that there are grim arrangements. Beware of judging them by whatever human values are in style. As well expect Nature to answer to your human values as to come into your house and sit in a chair. The economy of nature, its checks and balances, its measurements of competing life—all this is its great marvel and has an ethic of its own.” —Outermost House

“Here is the glimpse of nature in the full cosmic perspective—nature portrayed in her inexhaustible variety and gigantic ruthlessness. Here is the element of nightmare, here the haunting element of chance, here the splendor and the terror and the beauty of the waters and the air. There is never the slightest humanizing of the creature or its world, for which may Miss Carson be ever blest. Her world of the sea and air is ruled by its own gods and its own values.”

Wild nature as Otherness and Difference incarnate

“A wilderness in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain.”

—Wilderness Act of 1964

Science, as well as technology, attempts to trammel—”to catch or hold, as if in a net”—nature

Science is a network of ideas/concepts that attempts to ensnarethe natural world, to make us the noetic masters of nature

The UNKNOWN and the UNKNOWABLE are the untrammeled and the untrammelable—the essence of wildness

Wild nature as Otherness and Difference incarnate

Steven Vogel (1954-)

unanticipated side-effects—and we could call that moment ‘nature,’which comes to stand precisely for our inevitable failure, and to appear as the intractable Other of . . . the attempt to understandand control everything. . . All attempts by thought to grasp the world will always leave something left over and ungrasped, and ‘nature’ is the name we give to this very fact—and so its vengeanceturns out to be central to what it is.”

Ethical implication: “a lesson about humility, about limits, and the need for care.”

“In all our actions to transform the world . . . there is an inescapable moment of otherness, of resistance, of unexpected consequences and

Leopold Land Ethic + Carson Sea Ethic = Earth Ethic

Planet Earth Ocean

Both the Leopold land ethic and the Carson Sea Ethic scape-scaled: landscape and seascape

A global-/planetary- scale consciousness has emerged after 1969

Aldo Leopold, “Some Fundamentals Of Conservation in the Southwest” (1923)

The Earth (Ocean) Ethic“Possibly in our intuitive perceptions . . . we realize the indivisibility of the earth . . . 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 our fathers, will still be young.

“It is at least possible to regard the earth’s parts . . . as organs or parts of organs, of a coordinated whole, each part with a definite function. . . . in such a case we would have all the visible attributes of a living being, 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. . .”

This “suggests one reason why we cannot destroy the earth with moral impunity; namely, the . . . earth is an organism possessing a certain kind and degree of life, which we intuitively respect as such.”