# Land Ethic (Aldo Leopold) %% tags %% ## Summary The **land ethic** is the idea that humans are members of a broader ecological community and therefore have moral obligations to soils, waters, plants, and animals—not just to other people. ## Definition Formulated by **[Aldo Leopold](chatgpt://generic-entity?number=0)**, the land ethic proposes an expansion of ethics beyond human-to-human relations to include the entire biotic community. An action is considered *right* when it preserves the **integrity, stability, and beauty** of the ecological whole, and *wrong* when it undermines it. Rather than treating land as property or a resource, the land ethic reframes it as a **community to which we belong**, shifting humans from conquerors of nature to plain members and citizens of it. ## Properties - **Ethical expansion**: Extends moral concern from individuals to systems. - **Relational ontology**: Defines humans by ecological relationships, not dominance. - **Normative test**: Uses ecological health as a moral criterion for action. - **Cultural critique**: Challenges economic and industrial views of land-as-commodity. ### How it shows up in the wild - Conservation and rewilding movements - Environmental ethics and deep ecology - Sustainability frameworks that emphasize systems health over short-term gain - Indigenous-aligned stewardship practices (though Leopold writes from a Western tradition) ### Wayfinding %% DATAVIEW_PUBLISHER: start ```dataview TABLE WITHOUT ID questions AS "Responds to", origins AS "Informed by", ideas AS "Developed alongside", concepts AS "Builds on" WHERE file.name = this.file.name ``` %% | Responds to | Informed by | Developed alongside | Builds on | | ----------- | ---------------------------------------------------- | -------------------------------------------------------------------------- | ------------------------------------------------------------ | | \- | <ul><li>“[[A Sand County Almanac (1949)]]”</li></ul> | <ul><li>Environmental stewardship</li><li>Ecological citizenship</li></ul> | <ul><li>Ecological systems</li><li>Moral expansion</li></ul> | %% DATAVIEW_PUBLISHER: end %% [!info]- Changelog - <% tp.date.now(“YYYY-MM-DD”) %>: Initial concept capture