The Land Ethic – L’éthique de la Terre
p. 233-240
Résumé
Le concept de « land ethic », éthique de la Terre, se fonde sur l’expérience et les écrits d’Aldo Leopold († 1948) et correspond non pas tant à une « éthique de la planète Terre » qu’à une « éthique du paysage » au sens de l’« écologie du paysage ». Or le changement climatique global exige précisément une « éthique de la planète Terre » en complément de l’éthique du paysage. Dans « Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southweast », conservé à l’Université de Wisconsin, retrouvé et publié par John Baird Callicott en 1979, Leopold anticipe « l’hypothèse Gaia » de James Lovelock, publiée précisément la même année 1979. La conservation de la Terre est pour lui la question morale par excellence. De Lovelock à Michel Serres puis à Bruno Latour, parmi d’autres, tous se demandent comment résoudre les nombreuses catastrophes expérimentées par Gaia. L’éthique de la Terre, si elle peut demeurer anthropocentrique, doit être holistique, non individualiste.
Texte intégral
1Much of my work has been devoted to the philosophical development and defense of the « the land ethic » of Aldo Leopold, an American ecologist and conservationist who died in 1948. The « land ethic » has been translated en français as « l’éthique de la terre » which might be understood as « l’éthique de la planète Terre » or as « l’éthique du paysage » in the sense of « l’écologie du paysage » – landscape ecology. What Leopold meant by « the land ethic » is better captured by « l’éthique du paysage » than by « l’éthique de la planète Terre ». As Leopold writes :
All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise : that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts… Ecology simply enlarges the boundary of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively : the land… [A] land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for fellow members and also respect for the community as such.
2The summary moral maxim or golden rule of the land ethic is « A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise ».
3The « biotic community » is a concept in ecology referring to a distinct assembly or association of plants and animals – forests of various types with their characteristic faunas, various kinds of grasslands with their characteristic faunas, and so on. In ecology, a landscape or paysage is a local or regional group of biotic communities fragmented into « patches » usually by human agency – a patchwork of fields, woods, wetlands, lakes shores, and stream banks. So it is clear that the « land ethic » is spatially scaled to biotic communities, to ecosystems, to landscapes. Thus Leopold’s land ethic, his « l’éthique de la terre » is better rendered as « l’éthique du paysage ».
4Leopold built the land ethic on conceptual foundations borrowed from Charles Darwin. In the Descent of Man, Darwin provides an evolutionary account of the origin and development of ethics by natural selection. Human beings are incapable of surviving and rearing offspring as solitaries. Thomas Hobbes’s picture of the « state of nature » in which there is a war of every person against every other and in which human life is « solitary, nasty, brutish, and short » is an incoherent myth from an evolutionary point of view. Human beings can survive and reproduce only in intensely cooperative societies, pursuing life’s struggle collectively and in concert. For such cooperative societies to be possible, individual members must restrain their egoistic impulses. As Darwin put it, « No tribe could hold together if murder, robbery, treachery, etc. were common ; hence such crimes, within the limits of the same tribe, are “branded with everlasting infamy” ». For cooperative human communities to be possible, individual members must be able to trust one another, to share the fruits of their collective labor, to share child and elder care, to put themselves in harm way to defend one another against attack from other animals and from other tribes of human beings.
5Darwin speculates that such socially beneficial traits as cooperation, sharing, and self-sacrifice evolved from the « parental and filial affections » becoming more widely directed to more distantly related individuals – brothers and sisters, uncles and aunts, cousins, grandparents – thus creating a family society. He speculates that such family societies merged to form tribes ; and eventually tribes merged to form nations. In general, Darwin envisions a process gradual community expansion and consolidation. As he sums it up,
As man advances in civilization, and small tribes are united into larger communities, the simplest reason would tell each individual that he ought to extend his social instincts and sympathies to all the members of the same nation, though personally unknown to him. This point being once reached, there is only an artificial barrier to prevent his sympathies extending to the men of all nations and races.
6The year of Leopold’s death, 1948, the United Nations enacted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, fulfilling – if only in theory and in the ideal – Darwin’s vision of our sympathies and moral sentiments extending to the men and women of all nations and races. Since 1948, with the advent of air travel, global commerce, radio and television communications, cell phones, the internet, the blogosphere, social media, twitter, we find ourselves living in a global village – an transnational human community.
7Building directly on Darwin’s scenario of the origin and development of ethics, Leopold envisioned the next step in the extension of human sympathies and moral sentiments : to fellow-members of the biotic community and to the community as such (or as a whole).
8Our moral sentiments and sympathies are evolved to respond to the perception of community membership. Thus the way to bring about a land ethic would be to widely disseminate an ecological worldview. One might say that Leopold was the original deep ecologist. He was not a follower of Arne Næss, the Norwegian philosopher – obviously, as Leopold died long before Næss coined the phrase « deep ecology ». But Leopold understood that ecology was more than a science. It is a worldview, a philosophy of nature, a metaphysics. If the ecological worldview became the dominant worldview, a land ethic would be its natural moral expression.
9The land ethic is still appropriate for the environmental problems it was designed to ameliorate – local and regional water pollution, soil erosion, disruption of ecosystem functions, anthropogenic introduction of invasive species. All are persistent ecological insults and the widespread adoption of a land ethic would help to correct them.
10The land ethic is tailored to the spatial scale of the local and regional objects of ecological concern – biotic communities, ecosystems, and landscapes. Not only is the spatial scale of the land ethic determined by the ontology of ecology, its temporal scale is similarly calibrated in reference to ecological processes – to ecological succession and to ecological disturbance regimes. For example, we lament the destruction of a forest for commercial purposes when it results in the loss of watershed protection. The forest can be regenerated in a few decades or at most a few centuries. The land ethic requires us to consider the ecological effects of our actions several decades or at most a couple of centuries into the future.
11We now face a new and unprecedented environmental problem that is planetary in its spatial scale – global climate change. And the temporal scale of global climate change is calibrated in centuries and millennia. We are now experiencing the nascent effects of global climate change – hotter summers, milder winters, more severe floods, more severe droughts, more violent weather, melting glaciers, less extensive ice-cover in arctic waters, rising sea levels, the acidification of the oceans. The full effects of global climate change are not expected to occur until the end of the present century and they are expected to last for several thousand years after that. Global climate change eclipses all our more local and regional environmental concerns and also entrains them – for example, it worsens the threat of local and regional species extinction and promises further to disrupt ecosystem functions that are already adversely affected by anthropogenic physical and chemical insults.
12The Leopold land ethic is incommensurate with the scale of global climate change – and therefore impotent in the face of global climate change. Nor can it simply be scaled up to the spatial and temporal proportions of global climate change. Furthermore, global climate change demands an environmental ethic tailored to not only to its spatial and temporal proportions, but to the sciences that reveal it – biogeochemistry and Earth systems sciences. Presenting a further challenge is the scale of the moral agent as well as the moral patient. Leopold envisioned the individual private landowner as the principal agent to implement the land ethic on his or her farm, ranch, or estate. But there is nothing effective that an individual can do to mitigate global climate change. Because each person’s individual contribution to the problem – his or her personal carbon footprint – is miniscule, reducing his or her carbon footprint has a negligible effect on total greenhouse gas emissions worldwide. Only by means of coordinated collective action can we hope successfully to address the problem.
13Global climate change demands an Earth ethic to complement the land ethic – « l’éthique de la planète Terre » to complement « l’éthique du paysage ». I say « complement » not « replace » because the land ethic remains valid and useful to address the problems that it was designed to address. The land ethic is not conceived to replace the other social ethics that emerged before it – family-oriented ethics, tribal ethics, nationalistic ethics, the ethic of universal human rights. Similarly, the Earth ethic (« l’éthique de la planète Terre ») should not be conceived to replace the land ethic (« l’éthique du paysage »); rather, the one should complement the other. To repeat : the land ethic (« l’éthique du paysage ») remains both valid and effective in regard to the environmental concerns that it was conceived to address.
14Fortunately, Aldo Leopold himself faintly sketched an Earth ethic (« éthique de la planète Terre ») in 1923, a quarter century before he composed « The Land Ethic » in the third part, « Conservation as a Moral Issue » of a paper titled « Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest ». Leopold did not succeed in publishing that paper during his lifetime. Eugène C. Hargrove discovered the typescript in the Leopold collection of papers in the archives of the University of Wisconsin. He was granted permission by the Leopold family to publish it in the first volume of the new journal he founded, Environmental Ethics, in 1979. Coincidentally – or providentially – that was the same year that Gaia : A New Look at Life on Earth by James Lovelock was published.
15As I will shortly indicate, Leopold, along with Vladimir Vernadsky, anticipates the Gaia hypothesis by more than half a century. Why attach so much significance to a faint sketch of an Earth ethic (« éthique de la planète Terre ») by Leopold when we have a much richer and equally passionate portrait of a living planet painted by Vernadsky in La biosphère, which was published in France in 1929 ? For two reasons, I answer – one personal, the other strategic. The personal reason : my work for nearly forty years has been devoted to expounding and defending the Leopold land ethic (« l’éthique du paysage ») and so expounding his Earth ethic (« éthique de la planète Terre ») provides my current work some continuity with my former work. The strategic reason : the Leopold brand is very well known and respected in the Anglophone environmental and conservation communities.
16In « Conservation as a Moral Issue », Leopold writes :
[It] is at least not impossible to regard the earth’s parts – soil, mountains, rivers, atmosphere, etc. – as organs or parts of organs, of a coordinated whole, each part with a definite function. And, if we could see this whole, as a whole, through a great period of time, we might perceive not only organs with coordinated functions, but possibly also that process of consumption and replacement which in biology we call the metabolism or growth. In such a case we would have all the visible attributes of a living thing, which we do not now recognize to be such because it is too big and its processes too slow. And there would also follow that invisible attribute – a soul or consciousness – which many philosophers of all ages ascribe to all living things and aggregations thereof, including the « dead » earth.
There is not much discrepancy, except in language, between this conception of a living earth, and the conception of a dead earth, with enormously slow, intricate, and interrelated functions among its parts, as given us by physics, chemistry, and geology. The essential thing, for present purposes, is that both admit the interdependent functions of the elements. Possibly, in our intuitive perceptions, which may truer than our science and less impeded by words than our philosophies, we realize the indivisibility of the earth – its soil, mountains, rivers, forests, climate, plants, animals, and respect it collectively, not only as a useful servant but a living being, vastly less alive than ourselves in degree, but vastly greater than ourselves in time and space – a being that was old when the morning stars sang together, and, when the last of us has been gathered unto his fathers, will still be young.
17Leopold hints at three possible philosophical foundations for an Earth ethic (« éthique de la planète Terre »):
1. A kind of individual and collective virtue ethics : « Ezekiel seems to scorn waste, pollution, and unnecessary damage as something unworthy, something damaging not only to the reputation of the waste, but to the self-respect of the craft and the society of which he is a member ». – mentioned in passing ;
2. Long anthropocentrism – responsibility to future generations : « the privilege of possessing the earth entails the responsibility of passing it on, the better for our use, not only to immediate posterity, but to the Unknown Future ». – mentioned in passing ;
3. Kantian non-anthropocentrism – respect for earth’s intrinsic value : « It is possible that Ezekiel respected the soil, not only as a craftsman respects his material, but as a moral being respects a living thing ». – developed over next six paragraphs (two of which I just quoted).
18In some ways, Planet Earth is a better candidate for a non-anthropocentric environmental ethic than are biotic communities, ecosystems, and landscapes. These ecological entities have fuzzy, indistinct boundaries ; they are often impressionistic and disappear upon close scrutiny ; and they are partly the artifacts of ecological study. They are, furthermore, open to all sorts of material and organic intrusions and are subject to both external and incorporated disturbances. Also, biotic communities are dynamic and unstable, constantly changing without direction, and are sometimes suddenly driven across a threshold into an alternative state of ecological attraction. By contrast, Planet Earth is ontologically robust. It has clear boundaries, nor is it in any sense an artifact of scientific study. It is open only to solar and incident cosmic radiation, the ultraviolet spectrum from which is partially blocked by the ozone in the Earth’s stratosphere. And most incident materials are incinerated in Earth’s oxygen-rich atmosphere, visible as « shooting stars ». Also, important for ethics, the geological temporal scales at which Planet Earth changes offer clear norms, in relation to which we can critically evaluate the changes forced upon the Earth by human activities. The chemical composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, for example, has remained relatively constant as has the pH and salinity of the Earth’s ocean.
19James Lovelock has further facilitated the development of an Earth ethic (« éthique de la planète Terre ») by personifying the living Earth with a proper name, Gaia. The essence features of his Gaia hypothesis are three :
1. Life is a planetary phenomenon ; it cannot exist in isolated patches on the Earth – as if the Earth were a mere vehicle for life – rather the planet as a whole is living thing.
2. Life or living matter (as Vernadsky preferred to think of it) has not only passively adapted itself to the pre-life conditions on the early Earth, life or living matter has actively transformed those conditions to favor more complex forms of life. The far-from-equilibrium chemical composition of the Earth’s atmosphere is most obviously and indisputably an artifact of life. The dead atmospheres of our sister planets have only traces of oxygen and nitrogen (the prevalent gasses in Earth’s atmosphere) and are dominated by carbon dioxide. But even the lithosphere is partly a creation of what Vernadsky calls « living matter ». Limestone, travertine, and marble – formed from sediments of the calcium-carbonate shells of oceanic organisms – are the most obvious examples, but I was astonished to learn that two-thirds of all the mineral species found on Earth are biogenic.
3. The living Earth is a cybernetic system, regulating its physical and chemical conditions to maintain fluctuations of various gradients – such as temperature, atmospheric and oceanic chemistry – within parameters favorable to life or living matter.
20A decade or so after Lovelock introduced the Gaia hypothesis, Michel Serres, similarly personified the Earth in his book Le contrat naturel. Serres notes the unprecedented philosophical challenge represented by the emergent globality of environmental concerns. Unlike the early Lovelock, however, Serres represents humans and Gaia as in violent conflict – a conflict foolishly initiated by humans. There is, thus, a need to sign a contract with the Earth, Serres argues, which would, in effect, make Gaia a political being or at least a being that may be represented politically. In La politique de la nature, Bruno Latour follows Serres in politicizing not only the Earth as a whole but also its many non-human denizens – however in a more democratic way than that suggested by Serres. Recently, Lovelock, in The Revenge of Gaia, has joined Serres by calling, in effect, for martial law and a dictatorial rule by a politburo of Gaian scientists.
21The non-anthropocentric Earth ethic sketched by Leopold and suggested by the early Lovelock violates a practical principle first articulated by Immanuel Kant – ought implies can. One ought to do (or not do) only what one can do (or refrain from doing). We can do many things to the Earth, but we cannot harm Gaia. It is irresponsible hyperbole to say, as do some, that « the planet is dying » or to say, as one of my colleagues says, that we are causing the planet to catch a fever, that the Earth is sick. Life on Earth has endured for 3.5 billion years. During that time the Earth has undergone many catastrophic changes. At one point in Gaia’s biography, the planet was almost totally glaciated. Gaia has experienced five previous mass extinction events, at least one – the one that killed off the dinosaurs – resulted from a collision with a huge meteor. After each of these mass-extinction events, life speciated anew – more effusively and prolifically than ever before. Homo sapiens is currently the cause of the sixth great extinction in Gaia’s biography – after which, in a few more million years (long after we humans are extinct, doubtless biodiversity will recover and increase. It is also irresponsible hyperbole to say, as some of my conservation-biology colleagues say, that we are stopping the process of evolution. Evolution cannot be stopped. All such talk is the height of hubris. The changes we are imposing on Gaia will benefit some species, just as they will harm others. What we are doing is driving changes in the environmental conditions on Earth to which we humans, as a species, are exquisitely adapted. We are making the Earth a less fit habitat for ourselves.
22So what can we do ? We cannot harm Gaia. Can we commit suicide as a species ? Perhaps we can with a nuclear holocaust. But even then, some humans now living in remote places, far from the targets of intercontinental missiles, might survive the destruction and the following nuclear winter to find themselves living in a state of savagery and barbarism. What is certain that we can do is to bring about the collapse of global civilization. As the recent financial crises have demonstrated, the world as we know it is over-connected and extremely fragile. A significant shift in global climate might precipitate a collapse of agricultural systems, attended by pandemic starvation and terrible suffering. States might well fail to be able to govern under such circumstances, leading to the emergence of fiefdoms ruled by tyrannical warlords, locked in mutual struggles for habitable territories and natural resources. If we can destroy global civilization, then surely we ought not to. If we can sustain global civilization, surely we ought to try to do so.
23Perhaps, therefore, an Earth ethic (« éthique de la planète Terre ») should be anthropocentric, but unlike traditional anthropocentric ethics, holistic not individualistic. We can care what kind of world our children, our grandchildren, and our great grandchildren will live in. But we can hardly care about the wellbeing of indeterminate individual persons living in the distant future. Ethics too has its characteristic spatial and temporal scales. We care less for spatially distant persons than those who are near. We can care for temporally distant persons, but only up to and not beyond a certain temporal horizon, which lies about a century out. Beyond that point, future persons become totally indeterminate and thus no objects at all for ethical concern.
24The thing that we can harm and the thing that exists presently and has existed for many thousands of years and can potentially extend at least an equal distance into the future is human civilization, now become global in spatial scale. Therefore, I suggest, the fitting moral patient of an anthropocentric Earth ethic (éthique de la planète Terre) is global human civilization.
25What about the fitting moral agent ? That too must be holistic. Already noted is the fact that individual action aimed at mitigating climate change is futile. The only existing entities capable of effective action to mitigate climate change are governments, and then they can be effective only if they act in concert. Although reducing one’s own individual carbon footprint results in no appreciable reduction of total greenhouse-gas emissions, environmentally virtuous behavior sets an example for others and can be contagious. As consumers we can support genuinely green technologies with our custom. And we can unite with others to form green political movements and demand that our governments take the problem of global climate change seriously and act effectively to address it.
Auteur
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John Baird Callicott
North Texas University
Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence Licence OpenEdition Books. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.
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