The Land Ethic for A More-Than-Human-World”

Year 2002, Issue: 16, 41 - 50, 01.10.2002

Ufuk Özdag

Abstract

With these opening lines in his famous essay "The Land Ethic," in A Sand County Almanac 1949 , Aldo Leopold, nature writer, scientist, and philosopher, presents evidence for his conviction that our ethical systems have, indeed, evolved since the past 3000 years. Yet Leopold complains that progress in ethics has, so far, involved only "the relation between individuals" and "the relation between individual and society." In his words, "[t]here is as yet no ethic dealing with man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus’ slave girls, is still property. The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations" 238 .

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