Of Ethics and Our Relationship to the Earth

I've been reading a series of essays from a book called Listening to the Earth, which is a textbook reader for community college classes. There is an essay in there by Aldo Leopold, one of the gurus of modern conservation, called "The Land Ethic" which is from his Sand County Almanac.

He makes an interesting observation that our ethics are evolutionary and although we've completed two sets of ethical imperatives - relationships between individuals and relationships between individuals and society - we have yet to develop a true ethical relationship to the Earth. This is certainly in keeping with the environmental movement that notes our "ownership" mentality for anything not human (animals, the air, the land, the sea). He writes:

"The first ethics dealt with the relation between individuals; the Mosaic Decalogue is an example. Later accretions dealt with the relation between the individual and society. The Golden rule tries to integrate the individual to society; democracy to integrate social organization to the individual.

"There is as yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it....the land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations."

That is the crux of the environmental/land-rights debate today: a disconnect in an ethical understanding of our relationship (and reliance) on the environment or, perhaps, a view that our relationship with the Earth isn't even an ethical issue! This is reminiscent of the "chattel" philosophy of old where women had no rights and slaves were simply an economic reality. The environmentalists see the Earth as a symbiotic and mutually necessary part of who-we-are. The land-rights philosophy sees the Earth as a commodity to be used for our purposes.

So until we can define and agree upon an ethical standard when dealing with Earth/environmental issues, we will be struggling with the save-the-earth and economics-have-priority dichotomy for generations. But...it is still hopeful, as we evolved with the human-to-human ethic and the human-to-society ethic. So, too, will be eventually evolve into a human-to-environment ethic. It may take environmental disasters (more than what is currently happening) to bring that about. Let us hope it doesn't take too long.