The Land Ethic Today J. Baird Callicott Aldo Leopold's life work centered on a single concern: conservation. In this connection, it might be worth noting that A Sand County Almanac's capstone essay, 'The land ethic' evolved from an earlier essay entitled 'The conservation ethic.' And, certainly, Leopold proposed a land ethic specifically to serve conservation goals. Today, however, conservation philosophy and its ecological underpinnings are in a state of transition. Organicism is out of fashion in ecology; ecologists now rally round a more individualistic paradigm, and stress change over stasis. And sustainable development is currently the bandwagon of conservation. A question thus arises: Can the land ethic serve as the moral touch- stone of conservation philosophy and policy today, or is it a relic of a conservation philosophy that is rapidly obsolescing? To put this question in context, let me begin with a review of the major historical currents of thought in American conservation. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were the first notable American thinkers to insist, a century and a half ago, that wild nature might serve "higher" human spiritual values as well as supply raw materials for meeting our more mundane physical needs. Nature can be a temple, Emerson enthused, in which to draw near and to commune with God (or the Oversoul). 1 Too much civilized refinement, Thoreau argued, can over-ripen the human spirit; just as too little can coarsen it. "In wildness," he wrote, "is the preservation of the world. ,,2 Building on the nature philosophy of Emerson and Thoreau, John Muir spearheaded a national, morally charged campaign for public appreciation and preser- vation of wilderness. People going to forest groves, mountain scenery, and meandering streams for religious transcendence, aesthetic contemplation, and healing rest and relaxation put these resources to a higher and better use, in Muir's opinion, than did the lumber jacks, miners, shepherds, and cowboys who went to the same places in pursuit of the Almighty Dollar. 3 Critics today, as formerly, may find an undemocratic and unAmerican presumption lurking in the Romantic- Transcendental conservation philosophy of Emerson, Thoreau, and Muir. To suggest that some of the human satisfactions that nature affords are morally superior to others may only reflect aristocratic biases and class privilege. At the turn of the century, Gifford Pinchot, a younger contemporary of John Muir, formulated a novel con- servation philosophy that reflected the general tenets of the Progressive era in American history. Notoriously, the country's vast biological capital had been plundered and squandered, for the benefit not of all its citizens, but for the profit of a few. Pinchot crystalized a populist, democratic conservation ethic in a credo - "the greatest good of the greatest number for the longest time" - that echoed John Stuart Mill's famous Utilitarian maxim, "the greatest happiness for the greatest number. ''4 He bluntly reduced Emerson's "Nature" (with a capital "N") to "natural resources." Indeed, Pinchot insisted that "there are just two things on this material earth - people and natural resources. ''5 He even equated conservation with the systematic exploitation of natural resources. "The first great fact about conservation," Pinchot noted, "is that it stands for development" - with the proviso that resource development be scientific and thus efficient.6 For those who might take the term "conser- vation" at face value and suppose that it meant saving natural resources for future use, Pinchot was quick to point out their error: "There has been a fundamental misconception," he wrote, "that conservation means nothing but the husbanding of resources for future generations. There could be no more serious mistake. ''7 And it was none other than Gifford Pinchot who first characterized the Muirian contingent of nature lovers as Topoi 12: 41-51, 1993. © 1993 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.