Aldo Leopold - The Land Ethic

As the title suggest, Leopold's argument hinges on the understand and conception of the "land ethic". As apparent in Callicott's Essay, this was a relatively new conception of ethics that was entirely ecocentric (and apparently, vehemently argued among modern philosophers). Leopold's argument is created from a need to re-understand and recapitulate where woman and man must place their ethical considerations. Leopold argues that these new considerations must be based in a central "ethic dealing with human's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it". How does the come into realization? A deliberate move away from any mood of anthropocentrism and a move instead towards considering the woman and man as apart of the world around them and not necessarily being the world around them.

As biotic beings, we, along with the rest of nature, evolve. Beings within eco-environments evolve, the system responds, the organism lives or dies, and wonderfully, the evolutionary chain continues to grow. It is easy to think of human as having the unique position of having stepped outside of this cycle; yet, our DNA still manifests itself in novel and unique ways, our social consciousness changes, declines, grows, and generally moves (in any particular direction), and we continue as individuals that both reflect our past and stand as a new, and perhaps more wiser, form of our genetically former selves. We do, however, stand in a point where our actions do indeed cause long-term, destructive, and certainly poisonous results within the eco-system that once supported our livelihood and well-being as earthly organisms. Leopold's point, then, derives itself from our ongoing process of evolution both literally and metaphorically. Certainly, evolution has brought us,  at least, to highly considering the world around us. With a consciousness, humans have a unique power to reflect on the process of living, to understand that we have an ability to affect and to affect, we can change what of which we are conscious.

The expansion of new moral considerability must be considered if we are to call ourselves as evolving beings. Our considerability of not man-of-nature but man-within-nature must be subject to this evolution as well. "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." Leopold argues that it is this idea for which must be striven. The evolution lies in the consideration of nature as inherently worth moral considerability and as well, the idea that man lies within nature as a product of it.