Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Of all the environmental ethics so far devised, the land ethic, first sketched by Aldo Leopold (1887–1948), is most popular among professional conservationists and least popular among professional philosophers. Conservationists are preoccupied with such things as the anthropogenic pollution of air and water by industrial and municipal wastes, the anthropogenic reduction in numbers of species populations, the outright anthropogenic extinction of species, and the invasive anthropogenic introduction of other species into places not their places of evolutionary origin (see land and water and biodiversity). Conservationists as such are not concerned about the injury, pain, or death of non-human specimens – that is, of individual animals and plants – except in those rare cases in which a species' populations are so reduced in number that the conservation of every specimen is vital to the conservation of the species. On the other hand, professional philosophers, most of them schooled in and intellectually committed to the modern classical theories of ethics, are ill-prepared to comprehend morally such “holistic” concerns. Professional philosophers are inclined to dismiss holistic concerns as non-moral or to reduce them to concerns about either human welfare or the welfare of non-human organisms severally (see normative ethics). And they are mystified by the land ethic, unable to grasp ... log in or subscribe to read full text