A Energy Ethic--Is There Hope Still?

An exam I'm writing had me pondering the finer points of Aldo Leopold's call (in 1949) to take up a "Land Ethic." I'm really not sure we're there (but read below, as I've decided my exam response-which was really an extra credit question-could serve double duty as pontificating blog post too). However, I got a bit distracted while writing that response and stumbled upon the news that Obama has assembled his environmental and energy team. After reading the article and doing a little deeper research, I am hopeful: I am thinking we may be headed toward an energy ethic.

This crack team (notably lacking any marine or biological scientists, I might add, not to diminish the credentials of the selected few, but to point out that it's still not perfect), will be headed by Dr. Steven Chu from the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab (who, while not trained in biology, has shown an increasing interest in biosciences in recent years). This guy is a smarty-pants. He won a Nobel Prize in Physics in 1997 and has written a ton, taught a ton, innovated a ton, and seems kind of engaging to boot (see video of him at the National Energy Summit). Additionally, he was a part of ScienceDebate2008, showing that science and public support of science is a priority. I hope, despite the falling gas prices and distraction of the flailing economy, that as we move into 2009 we will take energy efficiency, energy policy, energy dependence and more importantly, energy and non-energy science, in general, more seriously.

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In “A Sand County Almanac” Aldo Leopold wrote of his observations of nature, the changes that had befallen much of the American West, and he culminated with his chapter “The Upshot,” a call to arms about what the future could hold, given a commitment to “The Land Ethic.” He wrote:

“An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence…In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it…A land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of ecological responsibility for the health of the land.”

What Leopold was invoking was the need for each citizen to be a part of the land and to act accordingly as a steward—he observed that we saw the land too much as a commodity belonging to us and needed to view it “as a community to which we belong.” Leopold was a forester by trade and had seen the destruction not only to the landscape, but also to the waterways, resulting from poor agricultural and forestry practices. In 1949, when he published this book, he acknowledged a fundamental flaw of natural resources: that when the emphasis is put on the economic value of the land and the products we extract from it, comes detriment to the land itself. This was obviously before the era of off-road vehicles, large-scale industrial agriculture, and off-shore drilling, yet his message seemed as urgent and timely then as it seems now, 60 years later.

Sadly, we (the collective “we”) have not grabbed ‘hold of “The Land Ethic” of which Leopold wrote. The current spate of research and published papers describing “ecosystem services” (see Costanza 1997 and Balvanera 2001) in effect acknowledges our need to see the environment as a commodity in order to justify conserving, protecting, and restoring it. This is as true in the marine system as it is on land. Off-shore drilling, industrial fisheries, eutrophication and contamination of our coastal waterways are evidence of our continued role as conquerors rather than stewards.

Leopold wrote that “The ordinary citizen today assumes that science knows what makes the community clock tick; the scientist is equally sure that he does not. He knows that the biotic mechanism is so complex that its workings may never be fully understood.” Our role as marine scientists is to communicate to Leopold’s “ordinary citizen” that science doesn’t know what makes the community clock tick in its entirety, but that the discipline of science, in its compartmentalized fashion, is learning more and more with each question asked and it is the ordinary citizen’s responsibility to be as keenly interested in the “biotic mechanism” as he is in his 401K. Additionally, with this “biotic mechanism” changing so rapidly due to our actions, we must devote increasing efficiency to the pursuit of understanding, lest we have no land-community and water-community to write about in 60 years.


Balvanera, P., G.C. Daily, P.R. Ehrlich, T.H. Ricketts, S.Bailey, S. Kark, C. Kremen and H. Pereira. 2001. Conserving biodiversity and ecosystem services. Science 291: 2047.

Costanza, R., R. d'Arge, R. de Groot, S. Farber, M. Grasso, B. Hannon, K. Limburg, S. Naeem, R.V. O'Neill, J. Paruelo, R. G. Raskin, P. Sutton, M. van den Belt. 1997. The value of the world's ecosystem services and natural capital. Nature 387(6230):255.