Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic

As an academic grandchild of Aldo Leopold, I have always been a huge fan of the man.  He was decades ahead of his time.  He is decades ahead of our time.  My mentors, the Hamerstroms were students of Leopold.  Frederick was Leopold’s only graduate student and Francis was his only female student.  Through the years,  I have made numerous observations pertaining to the LAND ETHIC.  Leopold stated that we treat the land as a commodity and it is not until we realize that we are part of a community.  We have treated the land as a commodity for all of our existence.  The problem is that people treat each other like commodities.  We kill, rape, and abuse each other continuously.  Humans generally focus on their own basal needs or we do horrible atrocities in the name of some god, politics, person, or cause.  Hitler wiped out millions and the United States acted against him, the conscious of the planet at the time.  In recent years, our moral compass has been completely messed up.   We have now become too engrossed on our greed and not on our world.

We are destroying our planet’s fresh water through fracking and a variety of pollution.  We are breeding and consuming ourselves into oblivion.  We need the LAND ETHIC, but we are not ready…we will never be ready at the stage that we are at now.  We all have a purpose on this planet and we all have a responsibility to our fellow creatures and to those who come after us.  Each one of us needs to think about what sacrifices we can make in our lives to make the future better.