Millstein, Roberta L. (2024) The Land Is Our Community: Aldo Leopold’s Environmental Ethic for the New Millennium. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, IL. ISBN 9780226834481

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Abstract

Informed by his experiences as a hunter, forester, wildlife manager, ecologist, conservationist, and professor, Aldo Leopold developed a view he called the land ethic. In a classic essay, published posthumously in A Sand County Almanac, Leopold advocated for an expansion of our ethical obligations beyond the purely human to include what he variously termed the “land community” or the “biotic community”—communities of interdependent humans, nonhuman animals, plants, soils, and waters, understood collectively. This philosophy has been extremely influential in environmental ethics as well as conservation biology and related fields.

Using an approach grounded in environmental ethics and the history and philosophy of science, Roberta L. Millstein reexamines Leopold’s land ethic in light of contemporary ecology. Despite the enormous influence of the land ethic, it has sometimes been dismissed as either empirically out of date or ethically flawed. Millstein argues that these dismissals are based on problematic readings of Leopold’s ideas. In this book, she provides new interpretations of the central concepts underlying the land ethic: interdependence, land community, and land health. She also offers a fresh take on of his argument for extending our ethics to include land communities as well as Leopold-inspired guidelines for how the land ethic can steer conservation and restoration policy.

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Item Type:	Open Access Book
Creators:	Creators Email ORCID Millstein, Roberta L. rlmillstein@ucdavis.edu 0000-0002-6493-6428
Additional Information:	Open access funded by the University of California, Davis Library.
Keywords:	Aldo Leopold biodiversity conservation biology environmental ethics environmental policy interdependence land community land ethic land health stability
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Biology Specific Sciences > Biology > Ecology/Conservation General Issues > History of Science Case Studies
Depositing User:	Dr. Roberta L. Millstein
Date Deposited:	29 Aug 2024 04:09
Last Modified:	29 Aug 2024 04:09
Item ID:	23847
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Official URL:	https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/...
Subjects:	Specific Sciences > Biology Specific Sciences > Biology > Ecology/Conservation General Issues > History of Science Case Studies
Date:	28 August 2024
URI:	https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/id/eprint/23847

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