21st Century Problems

Spotted Owl Recovery Plan- Oregonian Article

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Spotted owl recovery plan recommends preserving old forests and doing away with new invaders

Eric Mortenson, The Oregonian Here’s the link.

Again, it’s not really clear to me why “Controlled removal of barred owls to determine if spotted owls reclaim territory would be a worthwhile experiment, he (I think Forsman?) but isn’t financially or logistically sustainable.” killing creatures to find out whether a policy works- a policy you could never implement anyway, is the right thing to do. Note whatever kind of question this is, it is not a “science” question.

One of the commentors to the Oregonian piece wrote that there is a difference between “not doing something” (e.g., cutting trees), doing something (growing more habitat), and doing something that involves direct killing of other species. I am more focused on killing to do something that can’t work to save the species, but there is an ethical issue even if killing one species of owl would be effective in saving another species.

A long-anticipated recovery plan for the northern spotted owl, due by Friday, recommends preserving the best of its favored old-forest habitat across federal, state and private property lines and killing barred owls that compete with it for territory.

Those actions can steer spotted owls back from the brink of extinction, the plan says, but it could take 30 years and cost $147 million.

Whether conserving habitat and reducing competitors will save the spotted owl, however, is an unanswerable question.

“We do our best and hope for the best,” says Eric Forsman, a U.S. Forest Service wildlife biologist considered among the nation’s leading experts on spotted owls. “There’s a lot we don’t have control over.”

The owl was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1990, touching off the Northwest “timber wars” and clamping down on federal forest harvests. The first recovery plan surfaced in 1992, but disappeared in a flurry of lawsuits and policy rhetoric that has marked the issue ever since.

The new plan is a revision of a 2008 document so marred by political interference that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which wrote it, agreed it was scientifically indefensible and asked a federal judge to send it back.

The revised version has been stalled since 2010 by threats of lawsuits. It applies across the spotted owl’s range in Oregon, Washington and Northern California; fish and wildlife’s Portland office coordinated the work. The plan does not regulate logging or habitat practices, but agencies such as the U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management must consult the plan as they manage forests.

Initial reaction to the plan is mixed.

Forsman and fellow owl scientist Bob Anthony, a retired fish and wildlife professor at Oregon State University, say success is uncertain because of the barred owl, which migrated from the east and was first documented in the Northwest in the 1970s. It’s larger, more aggressive, favors the same habitat and is a less picky eater than the spotted owl.

“Given that the barred owl is part of the equation,” Forsman said, “it’s no longer clear that protecting habitat is going to do the job.”

Controlled removal of barred owls to determine if spotted owls reclaim territory would be a worthwhile experiment, he said, but isn’t financially or logistically sustainable.

“The best we can do is manage a considerable amount of habitat for spotted owls and let the chips fall where they may,” he said. “It’s way too early to give up at this point and say there’s nothing we can do for spotted owls.”

Anthony said competition between owls makes it crucial to conserve as much suitable habitat as possible. “The key issue is how much habitat can be preserved, and what will be socially and politically acceptable to the residents of the Pacific Northwest,” he said.

Others believe the recovery plan is a good step.

“A really excellent effort to incorporate the best science available,” said Paula Swedeen, director of ecosystem service programs for the Pacific Forest Trust, which works with forest owners on a variety of sustainability projects. “This plan says there is high-quality habitat everywhere that needs to be preserved to give the owl the best chance possible.”

Dominick DellaSala, president and chief scientist of the Geos Institute in Ashland, welcomed the plan’s increased emphasis on owl protection on private and state forests, which he said have become a “black hole” for the owl.

“Because of heavy cutting, it was putting more protection onus on federal land,” he said. “They (non-federal lands) need to do their part,” he said.

But he said a better solution is taking old forests “off the chopping block” completely He said the timber industry in Washington and Northern California have “moved on” from dependence on old-growth logs harvested on federal land, but Oregon lags behind.

“Why pick at this scab of logging the old forest?” he asked. Thinning older forests would provide logs needed by mills, he said.

A spokesman for the Oregon Forest Industries Council said key pieces of the plan are incomplete. “We don’t know what’s in it, it’s very vague,” said Ray Wilkeson. “It’s like an empty shell.”

He said it’s unclear how federal officials will use computer modeling to determine the owl’s habitat requirements. A modeling tool developed for the recovery plan combines information from 4,000 spotted owl sites and 20 years of demographic data to depict where owls nest and roost now and where they are likely to do so in the future. The model allows researchers to plug in variables such as the presence of barred owls and the impact of climate change.

Where Have All the Seedlings Gone? Gone to Crown Fires, Every One

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Check this out from the Summit County Citizens Voice here..

Perhaps we’re back to tree planting, just about 30 years after the last surge (the circle of life). We could start those nurseries running, get the tree-coolers back online.. and go for it…

I was looking for good tree quotes for a retirement party and found this today..

Acts of creation are ordinarily reserved for gods and poets. To plant a pine, one need only own a shovel.

Aldo Leopold. But I digress…

SUMMIT COUNTY — Wildfires that have burned across almost 750,000 acres in Arizona are doing more than turning forests into charred stumps.

Researchers with Northern Arizona University say the fires, burning in unnaturally dense stands of ponderosa pine, are turning the forests from carbon sinks into net carbon producers — and, the fires have burned so hot that they aren’t finding many signs of regeneration.

Mike Stoddard, a forest ecologist with NAU’s Ecological Restoration Institute, has been looking for a sign, any sign, of ponderosa pine seedlings 15 years after the 1996 Hochderffer Fire, a crown fire that burned hot through 16,000 acres west of the San Francisco Peaks, near Flagstaff.

“These large fires are devastating our forests,” Stoddard said. “We’re concerned that ponderosa pine is not regenerating after these wildfire events.”

Crown fires burn into the canopies and treetops or crowns of the trees — massive, intense crown fires, such as the Wallow Fire in eastern Arizona, are not natural in the ponderosa pine forest. Naturally occurring ponderosa pine fires burn along the ground, or base, of the trees.

Scientists also are concerned about the invisible impacts of crown fires. The fires are contributing to global warming by upsetting the carbon balance while they are burning, and for years afterward, according to the NAU researchers.

In a study conducted from 2001 to 2007, forest ecologist Matthew Hurteau with NAU’s School of Earth Sciences and Environmental Sustainability found that the nation’s wildfire emissions were the equivalent of 4 percent to 6 percent of all emissions from burning coal, oil and natural gas. The percentage of lingering emissions is even greater.

“We’re looking to forests to take in carbon, thereby lowering the greenhouse gases. But at a site like the Hochderffer Fire, the grassy vegetation that’s growing in is not making up for the amount of carbon that’s being released from the dead trees,” he said.

Across Arizona Highway 180, the story is much the same. NAU forestry professor Tom Kolb is calculating the amount of carbon dioxide moving between the land and the air at the site of the Horseshoe Fire. This 8,000-acre crown fire also burned in 1996.

“The fire has had a long-term legacy effect on the capacity of this site to take in and store carbon dioxide,” Kolb said. “This site has gone from being a carbon sink, where carbon was being stored, to a carbon source, where carbon is being released.”

With carbon making up about half the dry weight of a tree, researchers say overstocked ponderosa pine thickets can store a lot of carbon, at least for a while.

“Storing carbon in lots of little trees in a dense forest is like investing your retirement funds in junk bonds. It’s risky,” Hurteau said. “Our research has shown that if we reduce the amount of trees per acre and return ground fire to the system to manage those surface fuels, the carbon left in the live trees is much more stable because it’s less vulnerable to crown fire.”

Carbon flux research south of Flagstaff where excess small diameter ponderosas have been removed shows the remaining trees have become more vigorous.

“They photosynthesize at a much greater rate than the trees in the un-thinned situation,” Kolb said. “The thinned forest has an equal to or slighter greater rate of carbon sequestration than an un-thinned forest.”

Wild Earth Guardians on Zone of Agreement

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Thanks to Matthew Koehler for this op-ed from the ABQ Journal.

Lack of Logging Isn’t To Blame in Massive Forest Fires
By Bryan Bird / Wild Places Program Director, WildEarth Guardians on Fri, Jun 24, 2011

As the country floods and burns, climate change is upon us. Smoke from the Wallow Fire in Arizona still lingers, and the predictable but misplaced finger-pointing has begun.

As the grandstanding goes on, however, innovative, collaborative efforts are quietly reshaping the federal forest policies that got us here in the first place and charting a sustainable future for the National Forest System.

Contrary to public perception, there have been few lawsuits challenging sensible fuel reduction on the national forests in the last decade. The GAO concluded in 2010 that about 2 percent of all hazardous fuel reduction decisions by the Forest Service nationwide were litigated. The handful challenged were because of unwarranted impacts to water, wildlife and other valuable resources the national forests generate for Americans.

Ignored in the national discourse: the U.S. Forest Service, loggers, the wood utilization industry and conservationists have been spending valuable time and resources in the woods finding a zone of agreement.

We need to go back more than a couple of decades to understand how the current wildfire situation arose.

During the last hundred years or so the lower elevation, dry pine forests of the west were severely logged over, leaving a nearly uniform mass of small trees. Domestic livestock grazing, which suppresses the grasses that normally carry low intensity fire fostered the proliferation of pine seedlings and aggravated conditions. On top of it all, humans became extremely effective at suppressing most wildfires, leaving the overgrowth unchecked.

Cutting itself out of business, the lumber industry is mostly gone and the market for lumber is at record low. Supposing we threw aside all environmental concerns and opened our public forestlands to logging on a historic scale, as some have suggested, there would be no use for the logs. In a free market system there has to be demand or no amount of deregulation is going to make a difference.

Throw in climate change and drought and you have all the ingredients for the Wallow Fire and others burning in the Southwest. The science is clear; big fire years track drought cycles, and climate change is exacerbating those conditions.

The fires are predictable, but can we do anything to mitigate their effect? Yes, we can.

Starting in 2001 with Sen. Jeff Bingaman’s Collaborative Forest Restoration Program in New Mexico, now expanded nationally, former adversaries began developing forest restoration projects that are environmentally sound and effective. In New Mexico alone, more than 30,000 acres have been treated and about 600 jobs created through the program.

More important, perhaps, are the program’s less quantifiable results, as an atmosphere of litigation and acrimony surrounding resources has given way to a spirit of cooperation.

Logging in the historic sense will leave the forests more vulnerable, not less. On federal, public forests, cost-effective fuel reduction is accomplished with other tools including: wildland fire use, prescribed fire, thinning and removal of livestock grazing pressure.

The Forest Service treated hazardous fuels on one and a half million acres with thinning or burning in 2010; many of these acres are strategically located around communities and proved critical in defending Arizona towns in the latest blaze.

Senators John Kyle of Arizona and Ron Wyden of Oregon told a senate committee recently that the Forest Service needs to pick up the pace of hazardous fuel treatments on the national forests. While that is true and the Collaborative Forest Landscape Restoration Program requires full funding, we live in time of shrinking budgets and the acute effects of climate change. Strategic use of resources will be critical.

In addition to forest fuel treatments, it is time to start taking personal responsibility, demanding appropriate county zoning and placing the enormous costs of fire fighting on the parties that encourage development in fire-prone forests.

That is the real work of preparing for wildfire in a climate-changed world.

Char Miller on Forests Going to Pot

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Check this essay out- here’s a quote:

The concentrated effort to stop this despoliation has led the local, state, and federal agents engaged in this oft-dangerous work to refer to themselves as the Thin Green Line. They do not see their actions simply as a piece of the controversial War on Drugs, but as a battle to protect and preserve imperiled landscapes. Yet there is not enough money or labor to do this critical rehab work. In 2010, volunteer restoration teams managed to reclaim 70 sites across the state, but more than 800 had been identified. Still, they and law enforcement do what they can.

Or, better, do what they feel they must. Lt. John Nores, Jr., of California’s Department of Fish and Game makes this case in War in the Woods: Combating the Marijuana Cartels on America’s Public Lands, a hyped-up if compelling account of the anguish he and his comrades feel at the end of each operation. Notwithstanding the book’s evocation of Vietnam–camouflaged strike forces slipping though a dense tangle wary of booby traps and stalking a well-armed enemy–it also advocates full restoration of the abused land.

Just before taking down an illegal dam that fed a major cultivation site along Bonjetti Creek in eastern face of the Santa Cruz Mountains, Nores muses:

“The creek water above the dam is clean, clear, and cold, just like a high-mountain trout stream in California’s Sierra Nevada. The surrounding ferns, grasses, and thick tree canopies above the creek are similarly pristine and beautiful….Standing here I have a hard time imagining that more than a million people are hustling around the San José area only a short distance from us, and yet these amazing natural areas are so close and provide so much to our environment and its wildlife species.”

MJ on Public Lands- Let’s Try Something Different

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See this article,
“Investigators uncover largest outdoor pot grow in Oregon’s history”.

On Wednesday, the Wallowa County Sheriff’s Office, assisted by the Oregon State Police SWAT team with air support from the Oregon Army National Guard, served a search warrant at the northeast Oregon location and arrested six suspects.

“The resources, time and effort these outdoor growers are committing to avoid detection and protect the site pose a significant risk and danger to the public and law enforcement officers,” said Fred Steen, a sheriff’s spokesman. Steen added that the grow was ongoing for a substantial period.

La Grande Police Sgt. John Shaul called the operation “staggering,” saying eradication of the plants took two days.

“Many people would be outraged at the damage to our public lands caused by illegal marijuana growers,” he said.

Investigators also found campsites and numerous weapons, including semi-automatic long barrel firearms and handguns. Food, water and other supplies were found at campsites that could sustain the growers for several weeks, according to deputies.

The United States Forest Service and OSP Fish & Wildlife will survey the site to determine the environmental damage and how to rehabilitate the altered terrain.

My understanding is that people want to grow on public land as opposed to private so their property won’t be confiscated when they are caught. It seems like a policy with bad unintended consequences. I’m with Fenwood and others who like the legalize-and-tax approach. Seems like it could save- and earn- substantially more federal dollars than, say, removing the Fiddlin’ Foresters website.. Maybe it’s time for national forest neighboring communities to rise up and say “enough,” before someone gets killed.

Tempest in a Violin Case- How Would You Reduce Duplication?

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Don’t know if it’s a slow news period, the beginning of silly season (pre-election behavior) or both. Note: this post is not intended to open the floodgates of politician-bashing. It is intended to direct our attentions (and possibly, indirectly to the Administration and the Congress) to the question of “given our current economic climate, how can we best reduce costs and avoid duplication in federal land management and associated work?”

The President himself says that the government should not pay ($125 per year) for the Fiddlin’ Foresters website. All the details are found in this post at at Wildfire Today, including a link to the handy Waybackmachine site which apparently shows web content from the past.

Now the mission of the Fiddlin’ Foresters seem fairly important:

Through lively and entertaining musical performance, we provide conservation education, enhance employee morale and communicate the value of public service and federal land management in a new century of service.

The FFs attempt to improve morale (I can vouch personally for that) and call us to the importance of public lands through the arts. I personally think the FS would be a better place with more attention to morale and internal cohesion. I think the employee survey says something along the same lines.

But if you were to find the biggest budget buster and remove it, what would it be?

I have three candidates:

1. Recombine the federal land management agencies to reduce duplication. Or at least
2. Require BLM, NPS, FS and FWS to plan together where their jurisdictions are adjacent.
3. Stop handing out research funds to do the same thing to six or seven different agencies. For example, NSF, NOAA, the Forest Service, and USGS all appear to fund studies around what land managers need to know. Some funding goes to grants that scientists must apply for, and spend time developing. You have FS scientists writing grant proposals to get USGS funding and vice versa. There is no mechanism to avoid duplication, and the mechanisms to ensure that the products are useful are not all that clear. I wrote about them in the “Conveyor Belt” post here.

What are your thoughts?

Summer Safety Message: Beware of Marijuana Growers!

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As asked for by a reader, the straight scoop on safety in the woods with regard to  marijuana cultivation. Here’s a link to a video that shows some pot growing on the Mendocino.

 

Be safe in the National Forests
What to do if you encounter a marijuana cultivation site
Marijuana growers are active in the nation’s national forests and it’s important for your safety to be aware of your surroundings.
If you encounter a drug operation, back out immediately! Never engage the growers as these are extremely dangerous people. If you can identify a landmark or record a GPS coordinate, that’s very helpful. The growers may be present and may or may not know that you have found their operation. Get to a safe place and report the encounter to any uniformed member of the Forest Service or to your local law enforcement agency.

Here are some clues that you may have come across a marijuana cultivation site:
 The smell of marijuana, especially on hot days, is like a skunk.
 Hoses or drip lines located in unusual or unexpected places.
 A well-used trail where there shouldn’t be one.
 Voices coming from an unusual place.
 People standing along roads without vehicles present, or in areas where loitering appears
unusual.
 Grow sites are usually found in isolated locations, in rough steep terrain (typically between
500 to 5,500 feet elevation.)
 Camps containing cooking and sleeping areas with food, fertilizer, weapons, garbage,
rat poison, and/or dead animals.
 Small propane bottles (so that the grower avoids detection of wood smoke.)
 Individuals armed with rifles out of hunting season.
As soon as you become aware that you have come upon a cultivation site, or have encountered
any of the above situations, back out immediately! Leave the way you came in, and make as
little noise as possible.
Get to a safe place and, as soon as possible, report the encounter to any uniformed member
of the Forest Service or to your local law enforcement agency. Report as much detail about
the location and incident as you can recall.

Wildness and Wilderness: A Few Quotes from David Oates

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The Economist piece here begins a series of posts on the topic of “what pieces of what we do are based on a pre-climate change/non-dynamic worldview, and what must we do to develop new approaches with climate change in mind?”

The comment from Les Joslin here pointing out that Thoreau’s quote was about wildness, not wilderness, reminded me of David Oates’ book Paradise Wild: Reimagining American Nature. Now, all who follow this blog know that I am not a wallower in deep thinking. I tend to be more interested in facts and actions than ideas. But I recognize that ideas (and words) are important, because they form a fundamental framing of the universe. If we are unaware of that framing we can talk past each other and never, ultimately, understand each other. And those misunderstandings can lead to attribution of bad intent, and rifts among us when, instead, there could be powerful surges of joint action for ourselves and the Earth.

Here are a couple of quotes from the book that seem relevant to our current discussion. You can find more excerpts, as well as his other work, on Oates’ website here.

Eden is a myth that has ended up telling its tellers, speaking through them without their ability to see it or to imagine any other words, or worlds. But we cannot afford to let this storyline use us any more. It is time to bring it into consciousness, recognize it as a historical artifact, and move to other ground. For the immediate political gains we make in using the Eden-and-Apocalypse language are paid for with long-term defeat. Like Muir, we find we cannot live in Eden, and that however “saved” it is, it is somewhere else. We trudge in a flat and dusty world, separated and alienated (as all the nature writers declare) from a vital connection with the world. Eden can’t be saved unless we are, too. Our fates are intertwined. We must re-imagine what Eden means.

“But they have too often veered into the dead-end language of Paradise Lost. When the rhetoric of Lost Eden shows up,as it does in classics like Muir and Abbey and lots of recent environmental writing and politicking, it pretty much squelches the possibility for grounded choices, for practical spirituality. For knowing when to keep the tree and when to make it into something else. That’s the real work (in Gary Snyder’s phrase):smutting along in the world. Glorying along in it, growing roses from our dungheaps and dungheaps from our roses. This work takes passion, energy, humility and perhaps humor. Willingness to try, to get soiled; to compromise, learn, improve. (note from Sharon: sounds like collaborative adaptive management?)

But these traits we cannot find when we are loaded down with post-Edenic guilt and pessimism. These leave us in a state of environmental denial, too exhausted from crisis-overload to pay attention; or whipped up into Puritan absolutism, searching for purity in the form of fantasy wildernesses and defeatist politics. “Apathy and dogmatism” in the words of James D. Proctor’s searching analysis of the forest debate. Neither response works very well in the world we actually live in, which generally isn’t about purity but is ready to reward attentiveness bountifully.”

Note I think Oates may be referring to this book edited by Proctor.

The Anthropocene- From “The Economist”- Prophetic or Heretical?

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Here’s Anthopocene the essay.

We had an interesting conversation about this piece at work and what it means to the “protected area”- roadless or wilderness- question. What happens when “what you can’t do” in protected areas is to respond to climate change? What happens when “letting things alone” or “what used to be” are not our targets- what should our conceptual moorings be in a shifting world?

 It is one of those moments where a scientific realisation, like Copernicus grasping that the Earth goes round the sun, could fundamentally change people’s view of things far beyond science. It means more than rewriting some textbooks. It means thinking afresh about the relationship between people and their world and acting accordingly.

Thinking afresh is the easier bit. Too many natural scientists embrace the comforting assumption that nature can be studied, indeed should be studied, in isolation from the human world, with people as mere observers. Many environmentalists—especially those in the American tradition inspired by Henry David Thoreau—believe that “in wilderness is the preservation of the world”. But the wilderness, for good or ill, is increasingly irrelevant.

Almost 90% of the world’s plant activity, by some estimates, is to be found in ecosystems where humans play a significant role. Although farms have changed the world for millennia, the Anthropocene advent of fossil fuels, scientific breeding and, most of all, artificial nitrogen fertiliser has vastly increased agriculture’s power. The relevance of wilderness to our world has shrunk in the face of this onslaught. The sheer amount of biomass now walking around the planet in the form of humans and livestock handily outweighs that of all other large animals. The world’s ecosystems are dominated by an increasingly homogenous and limited suite of cosmopolitan crops, livestock and creatures that get on well in environments dominated by humans. Creatures less useful or adaptable get short shrift: the extinction rate is running far higher than during normal geological periods.
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Some will want simply to put the clock back. But returning to the way things were is neither realistic nor morally tenable. A planet that could soon be supporting as many as 10 billion human beings has to work differently from the one that held 1 billion people, mostly peasants, 200 years ago. The challenge of the Anthropocene is to use human ingenuity to set things up so that the planet can accomplish its 21st-century task.

Forestry’s Next One Hundred Years: Leopold

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Gifford Pinchot’s utilitarian philosophy and management methods dominated US Forest Service thought, policy, and action throughout the 20th century. A quick read of Harold Steen’s The US Forest Service: A History, David Clary’s Timber and the Forest Service, and Paul Hirt’s A Conspiracy of Optimism: Management of the National Forests Since World War Two is testament enough of Pinchot’s domination. Add in the Forest Service sponsored movie The Greatest Good for icing on the cake.

But the next century belongs to Leopold at least in the eyes of film producer Steve Dunsky, who produced The Greatest Good. Dunsky’s new film, The Green Fire is about Leopold and his influence. Leopold’s revolutionary ideas emerged with the publication of A Sand County Almanac (1966), but the transition to mainstream thinking would not happen in the 20th Century. Dunsky says the 21st Century belongs to Leopold:

I think that was what was so exciting about doing this film is we didn’t just want to do a film about Aldo Leopold’s life, we wanted to talk about why he’s important today and the reason that this is in a way a sequel to The Greatest Good is that we see Leopold as being kind of the guiding vision of the Forest Service in the 21st Century. Gifford Pinchot and his colleagues in the early part of the 20th Century had a different idea about conservation: that nature was there to be used by people and it is. But Leopold’s vision is much more about people being part of a natural community, and that shift has been occurring in the Forest Service over the last twenty years. And I think that now is the time that we are really seeing the manifestation of that in the agency’s policy and our actions and so the timing is really perfect for Green Fire to be coming out.

Moving Beyond Agrarian Forestry
Like Dunsky, I believe the time is at hand for a change in philosophy from Pinchot to Leopold, or from “Group A” to “Group B” as Leopold described it:

[O]ne group (A) regards the land as soil, and its function as commodity-production; another group (B) regards the land as a biota, and its function as something broader. How much broader is admittedly in a state of doubt and confusion.

In my own field, forestry, group A is quite content to grow trees like cabbages, with cellulose as the basic forest commodity. It feels no inhibition against violence; its ideology is agronomic. Group B, on the other hand, sees forestry as fundamentally different from agronomy because it employs natural species, and manages a natural environment rather than creating an artificial one. Group B prefers natural reproduction on principle. It worries on biotic as well as economic grounds about the loss of species like chestnut, and the threatened loss of the white pines. It worries about whole series of secondary forest functions: wildlife, recreation, watersheds, wilderness areas. To my mind, Group B feels the stirrings of an ecological conscience.

Leopold’s Philosophy in Brief
Leopold began his Forest Service career in 1909. He was promoted rapidly and was proud to part of the “outfit.” He was true-blue green Forest Service. Leopold became a forest supervisor of New Mexico’s Carson National Forest at age 24. But his enduring philosophy developed later. [We wouldn’t expect many 24-year-olds to have much of the world figured out]. As he grew older and wiser, Leopold developed the philosophy that would guide him, along with many in the wildlands preservation movement, the environmental ethics movement, and more. Here is an essence: “We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”

With age and wisdom, Leopold began to be more contemplative about his own and others attempts to “manage the land,” to “manage wildlife”, and so on. That led him to his commitment to help humanity discover a rightful place as “plain members” of a broader ecological community: “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals; or collectively: the land. … In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.”

Ten Key Insights from Leopold’s Land Ethic (The Encyclopedia of Earth)

First, Leopold’s Land Ethic helped create the field now known as “environmental ethics” or, more generally, environmental philosophy. … [Leopold] makes human considerations regarding the land and land use central to environmental decision-making and practice, but does not go as far as to make the land itself deserving of human moral consideration.

Second, Leopold’s land ethic challenges us to rethink our notion of what it means to say something deserves our human moral consideration (is “morally considerable”). … Western philosophical tradition restricts moral considerability to (some) humans on the grounds that only humans are capable of reason and rationality, use language, are rights-holders, duty-bearers, interest carriers or are endowed with a soul. By making the land itself morally considerable, Leopold challenges traditional Western conceptions of moral considerability …. [F]or Leopold, “the land” was included in the realm of things deserving moral consideration.

Third, Leopold’s land ethic challenges us to rethink what it is to be human. … Western philosophical tradition is that humans are different from and superior to nonhuman animals and “nature” … Leopold’s land ethic challenges and repudiates this division.

Fourth, in place of the favored Western view of humans as unlike other animals and nature, Leopold posits the notion of human beings as [plain] members of both human and ecological communities. This notion of humans as embedded in social and ecological communities forever challenges the time-honored distinction between humans and “the rest of nature.” No longer is it “obvious” that there is an essential difference between superior humans and inferior nonhuman animals and nature….

Fifth, Leopold’s land ethic challenges us to rethink what counts as a morally relevant value in ethics, ethical decision-making, environmental policy and philosophy. No one before Leopold had ever defended the view that ecosystem integrity, diversity and beauty were morally relevant—perhaps deciding—values in human interactions with other humans, nonhuman animals or the natural environment. In doing so Leopold went far beyond traditional theories of ethics, ethical selves and ethical values: He made the “integrity, diversity, and beauty” of ecological communities, along with the requisite nutrient flows and energy cycles that are necessary for “land health” (or, the ability of the land to self renew), as themselves morally relevant values—ones which sometimes could and should trump traditional values of human self-interest, individual rights, human freedoms (or liberties) and economic efficiency. …

Sixth, Leopold’s land ethic challenges humans to rethink the role of emotion, care, love and empathy not only in ethics, ethical decision-making, and ethical policy, but also in what it means for humans to owe things to each other and the land. For Leopold, the development of an “ecological conscience”—necessary to the adoption of the land ethic—requires the development of emotional, experiential (e.g., hands-on) ecological literacy. Rational intelligence that is not exercised in concert with affectional or emotional intelligence is simply inadequate in ethics, environmental ethics and environmental decision-making.

Seventh, Leopold’s Land Ethics has yet to be understood and appreciated. It challenges us to understand the relationships between ecological diversity and cultural diversity in the creation, maintenance and perpetuation of human and land health. Leopold explicitly links cultural diversity with biodiversity when he writes, “Wilderness was never a homogenous raw material. It was very diverse, and the resulting artifacts are very diverse. These differences in the end-product are known as cultures. The rich diversity of the world’s cultures reflects a corresponding diversity in the wilds that gave them birth.” … Leopold laments the “exhaustion of wilderness” and “world-wide hybridization of cultures” as the destruction of both ecological and cultural diversity. For Leopold, the “wild roots” of cultures and the importance of our ecological heritage are part of our humanness and our human cultural heritage that should be recognized and preserved. …

Eighth, Leopold’s land ethic makes forest and wilderness preservation necessary for any adequate ethic, environmental ethic or environmental policy. …

Ninth, Leopold’s land ethic is that he saw the valuable roles to be played by both the ecological scientist and the ordinary individual in the preservation of [wildness]. …

Tenth, Leopold’s land ethic challenges us to rethink the relationships among ecology, ethics and economics. Leopold rejected the conception and practice of both traditional laissez-faire economics and ethics because neither made ecological awareness and sensitivity to ecological contexts central to their enterprises. He writes: “That man is, in fact, only a member of a biotic team is shown by an ecological interpretation of history. Many historical events, hitherto explained solely in terms of human enterprise, were actually biotic interactions between people and land. The characteristics of the land determined the facts quite as potently as the characteristics of the men who lived on it.” …
[footnote and hyperlink references omitted . See here]

One Final Leopoldian Notion
I’ll finish with one of my favorite Leopold quotes: “Obligations have no meaning without reference to conscience, and the problem we face is the extension of social conscience from people to land.”

Is Leopold’s time at hand?