The Land Is Our Community

A contemporary defence of conservationist Aldo Leopold's vision for human interaction with the environment.

Informed by his experiences as a hunter, forester, wildlife manager, ecologist, conservationist, and professor, Aldo Leopold developed a view he called the land ethic. In a classic essay, published posthumously in A Sand County Almanac, Leopold advocated for an expansion of our ethical obligations beyond the purely human to include what he variously termed the "land community" or the "biotic community"—communities of interdependent humans, nonhuman animals, plants, soils, and waters, understood collectively. This philosophy has been extremely influential in environmental ethics as well as conservation biology and related fields.

Using an approach grounded in environmental ethics and the history and philosophy of science, Roberta L. Millstein reexamines Leopold's land ethic in light of contemporary ecology. Despite the enormous influence of the land ethic, it has sometimes been dismissed as either empirically out of date or ethically flawed. Millstein argues that these dismissals are based on problematic readings of Leopold's ideas. In The Land Is Our Community, she provides new interpretations of the central concepts underlying the land ethic: interdependence, land community, and land health. She also offers a fresh take on his argument for extending our ethics to include land communities, as well as Leopold-inspired guidelines for how the land ethic can steer conservation and restoration policy.