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Aldo Leopold's Hermeneutic of Nature

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2009

Lewis P. Hinchman
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Extract

Reprising an ancient strand of philosophical reasoning, contemporary environmental theorists often argue as if nature (the land, ecosystems) were a repository of value in itself, establishing guidelines for human conduct in moral and political matters. John Stuart Mill supposedly discredited such reasoning in his 1854 essay, “Nature.” But modern intrinsic-value-in-nature theories differ from those that Mill attacked, as a careful reading of Leopold's A Sand County Almanac reveals. Leopold, whose thought provides the inspiration for most of the intrinsic-value-in-nature theorizing within environmental philosophy today, tacitly rejects the modernist, physics-derived view of nature as a realm of timeless, abstract laws. He replaces it with a view of the land and its creatures as historically concrete, unique totalities that can almost be read as “texts,” and thus may inspire respect and love (rather than detached theorizing alone) on the part of the ecologically-aware person. The key virtue for Leopold is “perception,” a blend of training, hermeneutic skill, and identification with the natural world.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Review of Politics , Volume 57 , Issue 2 , Spring 1995 , pp. 225 - 250
Copyright
Copyright © University of Notre Dame 1995

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References

1. There is a vast literature on nature's intrinsic value. Some especially insightful contributions include: Rolston, Holmes III, Philosophy Gone Wild (Buffalo: Prometheus Books, 1986)Google Scholar and “Can and Ought We to Follow Nature?” Environmental Ethics 1 (Spring 1979): 7–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Callicott, J. Baird, In Defense of the Land Ethic: Essays in Environmental Philosophy (Albany: S.U.N.Y. Press, 1989)Google Scholar and “Rolston on Intrinsic Value: A Deconstruction,” Environmental Ethics 14 (Summer 1992): 129–43CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taylor, Paul, “The Ethics of Respect for Nature,” Environmental Ethics 3 (Fall 1991): 197–218CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Oelschlaeger, Max, The Idea of Wilderness: From Prehistory to the Age of Ecology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991).Google Scholar

2. Writers who elicit moral-political paradigms from nature include: Devall, Bill and Sessions, George, eds., Deep Ecology (New York: Peregrine Smith, 1985)Google Scholar; Berry, Wendell, The Unsettling of America (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1977)Google Scholar; Abbey, Edward, Desert Solitaire (New York: Ballantine, 1968)Google Scholar; Tobias, Michael, ed., Deep Ecology (San Diego: Avant Books, 1985)Google Scholar; Commoner, Barry, The Closing Circle (New York: Knopf Publishers, 1971)Google Scholar; Lopez, Barry, Arctic Dreams (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1986)Google Scholar; Sale, Kirkpatrick, Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional Vision (Philadelphia: New Society, 1991)Google Scholar; and Goldsmith, Edward et al. , Blueprint for Survival (New York: New American Library, 1972).Google Scholar For an analysis of this literature as a contribution to political theory, see Lewis, and Hinchman, Sandra, “Deep Ecology as Natural Right,” Western Political Quarterly 42 (Fall 1989): 201–28Google Scholar; Luke, Tim, “The Dreams of Deep Ecology,” Telos (Summer 1988): 65–92Google Scholar; Taylor, Bob Pepperman, “Environmental Ethics and Political Theory,” Polity 23 (Summer 1991): 567–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Merchant, Carolyn, Radical Ecology (New York: Routledge, 1992)Google Scholar; and Dobson, Andrew, Green Political Thought (London: UnwinHyman, 1990).Google Scholar

3. Cf. Oelschlaeger, , Idea of Wilderness, pp. 68–95Google Scholar (on modernism) and pp. 292–301 (on ecocentrism). Expressions of a biocentric or econcentric viewpoint are given in Schumacher, E. F., Small is Beautiful (New York: Harper and Row, 1973)Google Scholar; Callenbach, Ernest, Ecotopia (Berkeley: Banyan Tree Books, 1975)Google Scholar; Devall, Bill, Simple in Means, Rich in Ends: Practicing Deep Ecology (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1988)Google Scholar; Manes, Christopher, Green Rage: Radical Environmentalism and the Unmaking of Civilization (Boston: Little, Brown, 1990)Google Scholar; Mckibben, Bill, The End of Nature (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1989)Google Scholar; Tokar, Brian, The Green Alternative (San Pedro: R and E Miles, 1992)Google Scholar; Berry, Thomas, The Dream of the Earth (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1988)Google Scholar; Rifkin, Jeremy, Biosphere Politics (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1991)Google Scholar; and Snyder, Gary, The Practice of the Wild (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1990).Google Scholar

4. For the purposes of this essay I will collapse the distinction between natural law theory and classical natural right theory. That distinction is rendered sharp in Leo Strauss, , Natural Right and History (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1953).Google Scholar

5. Callicott, for example, concedes that “intrinsic value cannot exist objectively.” See his article, “Rolston on Intrinsic Value,” p. 132.

6. The term “deep ecology” was coined by the Norwegian philosopher, Naess, Arne, in his short but seminal paper, “The Shallow vs. the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement,” Inquiry 16 (1973): 95–100.CrossRefGoogle Scholar For Marietta's view, see “The Interrelationship of Ecological Science and Environmental Ethics,” Science and Ethics (Fall 1979), pp. 195–207. Also consult Hargrove, Eugene, Foundations of Environmental Ethics (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1989).Google Scholar

7. For discussion see Taylor, Bob Pepperman, Our Limits Transgressed: Environmental Political Thought in America (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1992), chapters 5 and 6.Google Scholar

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9. Stuart Mill, John, Principles of Political Economy (New York: Longmans, Green and Co., 1929), pp. 748 and 750.Google Scholar

10. See Taylor, , Our Limits Transgressed, and Passmore, John, Man's Responsibility to Nature (New York: Scribner's, 1974).Google Scholar Another Millean critic of intrinsic value theory is Losin, Peter; see his review of Callicott in Environmental Ethics 10 (Summer 1988): 169–76.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Glacken, Clarence J., Traces on the Rhodian Shore (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), p. 14.Google Scholar

12. Collingwood, R.g., The Idea of Nature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1945), pp. 43–48.Google Scholar

13. Ibid., p. 3.

14. Glacken, , Rhodian Shore, p. 6.Google Scholar

15. Collingwood, , Idea of Nature, p. 7Google Scholar.

16. Parenthetical references in the text which are prefaced by the letter “N” refer to Mill's, “Nature,” contained in Essential Works of John Stuart Mill (New York: Bantam, 1961), pp. 367–401.Google Scholar Parenthetical references prefaced by “SCA” refer to Leopold, Aldo, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Sierra Club/ Ballantine, 1970).Google Scholar

17. This conundrum has been investigated by Fritzell, Peter. See his “The Conflicts of Ecological Conscience” in A Companion to “A Sand County Almanac”, ed. Callicott, J. Baird (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987), pp. 128–56, especially p. 140.Google Scholar

18. See, for example, Ophuls, William and Boyan, A. Stephen Jr., in Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity Revisited (New York: W.H. Freeman, 1992), pp. 290 and 299Google Scholar, who identify “modesty” (as opposed to “Faustian striving after power”), “gentleness, frugality, humility,” and “natural simplicity” as the virtues that ecology suggests people should cultivate.

19. Some scholars, such as the ecological historian Donald Worster, have criticized the concept of a land “community” as a relic of the New Deal era. For discussion see Farney, Dennis, “Chaos Theory Seeps Into Ecology Debate, Stirring Up a Tempest,” Wall Street Journal (11 07 1994), pp. A1 and A8.Google Scholar A vindication of sorts of Leopold's position is found in Yoon, Carol Kaesuk, “Plants Found to Share Water With Neighbors,” New York Times (26 10 1993), pp. C1 and C10.Google Scholar

20. Robyn Eckersley comments that the problem with the land ethic, “as animal liberationists [particularly Tom Regan] point out, is that it is vulnerable to the charge of ‘environmental fascism' in that it provides no recognition of the value of individual organisms,” which can then “be sacrificed for the good of the whole.” Eckersley, , Environmentalism and Political Theory (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), p. 61.Google Scholar For a convincing rebuttal, see Callicott, , “The Conceptual Foundations of the Land Ethic,” in Companion to “A Sand County Almanac,” p. 206.Google Scholar

21. Oelschlaeger, in The Idea of Wilderness, has traced the objectivizing, detached stance of science toward its abstract object back to the “modernism” of Descartes, Bacon, Galileo and their successors, and—beyond them—to Parmenides. He claims that Leopold's, land ethic has “crossed the modernist divide between subject and object” (p. 236).Google Scholar I would prefer to say that Leopold helped to recast the nexus of subject and object, allowing us to think of them in a new way, but otherwise Oelschlaeger's argument dovetails with the themes of this article.

22. Let it be noted that Wisconsin itself did not manifest the qualities of an intact ecosystem. Leopold found complete integrity and beauty only in the Rio Gavilan country of Chihuahua state in northern Mexico, which he described as being “the cream of creation.” See Meine, Curt, Aldo Leopold: His Life and Work (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), pp. 367–72.Google Scholar

23. As early as 1933, Leopold had already embarked on his project of reconstructing the ecological history of a region, drawing both on human records and the “story” evident in the distribution of flora and fauna, patterns of soil erosion, and so on. See “The Virgin Southwest” (1933), reprinted in Orion (Winter 1991), pp. 18–23.

24. In The Idea of Wilderness (pp. 224–26), Oelschlaeger notes that Leopold's brand of ecology, in contrast to that of the influential A. G. Tansley, tended to be more historical and less quantitative-mechanistic, though Leopold certainly borrows some of Tansley's terminology in A Sand County Almanac.

25. Collingwood, , Idea of Nature, p. 10.Google Scholar

26. Glacken, , Rhodian Shore, p. 6.Google Scholar

27. Collingwood, , Idea of Nature, pp. 15–16.Google Scholar

28. See, in particular, Lovelock's, James E. influential book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

29. See, for an update, Cheney, Jim, “Postmodern Environmental Ethics: Ethics as Bioregional Narrative,” Environmental Ethics 11 (Summer 1989): 117–34.CrossRefGoogle Scholar A critique by Smith, Mick, “Cheney and the Myth of Postmodernism,” appears in Environmental Ethics 15 (Spring 1993): 3–17.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

30. See Holmes Rolston Ill's comment that for Leopold, “scientific laws never catch in individual detail all that goes on in a particular place, such as Okefenokee Swamp or Bryce Canyon. Each new lake and canyon will have some differences, [and these constitute] its historical particularity.” Rolston, , “Duties to Ecosystems,” in Callicott, A Companion to “A Sand County Almanac,” p. 266.Google Scholar

31. Among environmental writers, critics of specialization (whether as an economic practice or cognitive ideal) include Berry, , The Unsettling of America; Jeremy Rifkin, Declaration of a Heretic (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1985)Google Scholar; Commoner, , The Closing Circle; René Dubos, So Human An Animal (New York: Scribner's, 1968)Google Scholar; and Carson, Rachel, Silent Spring (Greenwich: Fawcett, 1962).Google Scholar

32. On the fusion of “is” and “ought” in ecological judgment, see Rolston, Philosophy Gone Wild. For other analyses of Leopold's land ethic, see Flader, Susan, Thinking like a Mountain (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1974)Google Scholar, and Callicott, , Companion to “A Sand County Almanac” and In Defense of the Land Ethic (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989).Google Scholar

33. Habermas, Jürgen, Knowledge and Human Interests (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), pp. 301–7.Google Scholar An analysis of environmentalism that leans heavily on Habermas is Dryzek's, JohnRational Ecology (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1987).Google Scholar

34. Critiques of the conception of science that dominates in the West are numerous in the ecological literature. See, for example, Berman, Morris, The Reenchantment of Nature (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Leiss, William, The Domination of Nature (New York: George Braziler, 1972)Google Scholar; Capra, Fritjof, The Turning Point (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982)Google Scholar; Ehrenfeld, David, The Arrogance of Humanism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978)Google Scholar; and Merchant, Carolyn, The Death of Nature (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1980).Google Scholar

35. See Rolston, Philosophy Gone Wild, chapter 6; Oelschlaeger, The Idea of Wilderness; Capra, The Turning Point; Berman, The Re-enchantment of Nature; and Cheney, “Postmodern Ethics.”

36. See Callicott, , “The Conceptual Foundations of the Land Ethic,” in Companion to “A Sand County Almanac,” pp. 186–217.Google Scholar

37. Gadamer, Hans-georg, Truth and Method (New York: Seabury Press, 1975), p. 273.Google Scholar

38. I am indebted to Fritzell's, excellent essay, “The Conflicts of Ecological Conscience,” pp. 146–49Google Scholar, for clarifying the paradoxes of our relationship to the cranes.