In the Sand Almanac, naturalist and forester Aldo Leopold, in 1949, argued that ethics needed to enlarge the community concept to include the “land.” Leopold wasn’t talking about acres of dirt and profits from agriculture and mining but about what he called “biotic” food chains that are also “fountains of energy.” Leopold obviously rejected the Cartesian metaphysics of dead nature as well as the view that humans are masters and conquerors. He advocated becoming “plain citizens” of the land. Ethics in an ecological sense, he wrote, “is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence.” He offered a deceptively simple ethical criterion: “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.” Ethics thus refers to limits that humans should impose upon themselves and therein lay our real freedom.
Leopold was well aware of the effects of midwestern dust bowls and diminished ecosystems—well before it became common parlance—and so he stressed that an ethic dealing with the human relation to the animals and plants that grow on the land was “an evolutionary possibility and an ecological necessity.” We must include soils, waters, plants, and animals—all of which make up the “land.” Ethics could no longer be restricted to relations just between human beings. Furthermore, for this ethics to be effective, to have motive force, there must be a change in consciousness from conqueror to citizen. We can only be ethical “in relation to something we can see, feel, understand, love, or otherwise have faith in.” He knew this change would be gradual because it depended on growing the awareness of ever larger numbers of people.
J. Baird Callicott, building on Leopold’s idea of the land and community, added to the chorus of environmental thinkers who rejected the Cartesian dualistic metaphysics that separated humans and other species, as well as humans and nature more generally and fostered the “subjugation” of nature. Callicott argues for a paradigm shift in our thinking based on a Darwinian-inspired biologically-based ecocentrism. Human communities and civilization are embedded in nature. Callicott enriched Leopold’s seminal insights and provided a great deal of philosophical heft. Leopold had argued for a change in consciousness. Drawing on the philosopher David Hume, Callicott adds a fleshed-out account of the motivation. Following Hume, Callicott claims that a moral sense is rooted in the human species’ capacity for empathy and sympathy. Hume’s insights are certainly confirmed by more recent developments in evolutionary biology, anthropology, and psychology. Combining this notion with Leopold’s enlarged concept of community provides a vision for reconciling the anthropocentrism/non-anthropocentrism dilemma. Callicott claims we have an anthropocentric responsibility to future humans and should have a “non-anthropocentric” respect for the planet. In a previous post, I argued in favor of an “enlightened anthropocentrism,” which in my view is consistent with Callicott’s extension of Leopold’s land ethic.
Accepting an obligation to future generations is difficult enough, but how do we instill non-anthropocentric respect and still value what does make humans special (and not so special)? In The Human Age: The World Shaped by Us, Elizabeth Kolbert points to the challenges. She writes that we watch nature documentaries and see magnificent vistas we would otherwise not encounter. All to the good, but there is a downside: we come to rely on virtual nature, nature “pixilated.” We fall prey to what in 2005 Richard Louv in Last Child in the Woods called “nature deficit disorder,” which is correlated with attention difficulties, obesity, higher rates of emotional and physical illness. Although this diagnosis is not in the DSM, what’s increasingly missing for many, especially children, is the vivid sensory experience of not only seeing but touching, smelling, and hearing nature. Kolbert wonders if in distancing ourselves “from the spell of the present, explored by all our senses,” that we may have ever shallower experiences and not understand enough to “protect nature’s precarious balance.” She argues that we must balance “high-speed digital life” with “slow hours of just being outside, surrounded by nature.” Studies have shown that people heal faster in hospitals when patients can look out windows and see green. According to another study, 120 minutes per week in the outdoors has a positive effect on mood and health . Our stone-age brains need rest from the digital, dopamine saturated world of screens. According to cognitive scientist Merlin Donald, digital media’s pressure on the nervous system has “the potential to seriously violate the ancient co-evolutionary pact between brain and culture that has kept the pace of technological] change within tolerable limits.”
Fortunately, many educators (bless them) have recognized the need to protect the emotional and cognitive bandwidth humans need to restore a sense of awe—beginning with preschool. The question is whether it will be enough—soon enough. The bright side: increasing numbers of “forest schools,” “nature schools,” schools that include gardens to grow food, and so on are emerging globally. These schools originated in Scandinavian countries but there are now hundreds in the U.S. alone. The problem in the U.S. is that they benefit primarily middle-class white kids whose parents can afford them. However, this movement is spilling over into public-school systems that integrate nature and the outdoors into kindergarten and primary education. Hopefully, this will begin to address the race and class disparities more robustly. To come full circle: we are inching our way to addressing Leopold’s insight that we must see, touch, and hear the “land.”