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The Ethics of Land Use
Elizabeth Anne Phares
Important Aspects of Nature
History
In our distant past we lived within nature. Paleolithic man asked for
the forgiveness of the animals he killed because he knew he was
connected to them, dependent on them for survival (Disch, 92). However,
our ideas about the world around us have changed drastically. Since at
least the time of Copernicus, “civilized” man has
had the false view that the universe revolves around humans. The
domestication of plants and animals has distanced us from the natural
world. There has been a false sense that we are not subject to the same
laws that govern every living thing, from bacteria to our closest
cousins, the chimpanzee. Christianity dealt with this idea by claiming
that man has dominion over nature, it exists only to serve us. Humans
were created in the image of the supreme being, which made them
different from the rest of the animals. During the Renaissance this was
taken even further by a belief that human power should be celebrated by
conquering nature. Machiavelli said we should be “building
dykes and barriers to hold back natures furry.” At that time
people viewed the natural world as a threat that man, as a superior
being, was obligated to keep at bay.
These beliefs were carried with us to the New World by Puritan
settlers. To them, nature and the wilderness were where evil lurked. It
was full of heathen Indians and all sorts of ungodly creatures that
threatened their existence. They sought to tame the land and convert
everyone to Christianity to maintain their idea of order. They viewed
themselves as soldiers of God, driving evil from the land and making it
serve the greater purpose.
After hundreds of years we have reached a point at which it is next to
impossible to find anything resembling wilderness in many parts of the
country. Most of the trees were cut down to make room for wasteful
farming practices, even on steep mountain slopes were there is the
potential for the greatest damage. The result is a land with vast areas
devoid of nature. A study at Cornell which examined the mental health
of people living in Manhattan, the classic example of an urban setting,
showed that 20% of them were indistinguishable from mental hospital
patients and that 60% of them showed evidence of mental disease. This
is not the case for people living in rural settings (Disch, 23).
Thoreau believed that both civilization and wilderness were necessary
for the health of people, that “The savagery of urban man,
untempered by wilderness discipline, was savagery for its own
sake”. Daniel Martin has said that our problem is that we no
longer feel like we belong the same way the animals and the plants do.
We see ourselves as isolated, as “souls from another realm
who are passing through an alien and unfriendly land” (Hull,
43). We created this alien land through our own destructive practices.
In addition to feeling lost and ruining our own health, we are damaging
the earth at an alarming rate. We pump billions of tons of harmful
gasses into the atmosphere, pour sludge and chemicals into our
waterways and bury radioactive material in our soil. We cut down our
trees, kill the animals and erode the soil faster than it can be
formed. “If the earth does grow inhospitable towards human
presence, it is primarily because we have lost our own sense of
courtesy toward the earth and its inhabitants...” (Berry, 2).
We now face a decision that will affect the lives of every organism yet
to come into existence on this planet. We can either return to our
place in nature and take only what is ours, or we can destroy
ourselves, selfishly consuming and polluting everything within our
reach.
The Solution
According to Ian McHarg, we must learn that we are subject to natural
laws. We will abide by them or we will die. Indeed, if we continue on
the path we are on we will destroy not only ourselves, but the world
around us. Paul Shepard has said that we first separated ourselves from
nature because we believed ourselves to be unique, the only species
capable of kindness, compassion, love and understanding. This
separation has led to violence and hostility towards ourselves and our
world. He compares our skin to the surface of a pond, it does not
separate us from nature because it and every other part of us is
nature. The web of life, he says, is not adequate to describe the real
connections. We are within nature as we are “in a room or in
love.” We are to the environment what an organ is to a body,
neither can survive without the other. We must realize that we and
everything around us are a critical part to a whole, and that killing
other parts like a cancer attacks organs will, in the end, kill us as
well.
Our first goal is to gain a respect for the world around us, down to
the most insignificant seeming organism. In our past we have treated
nature as our tool, and this must change. Lewis Mumford has said that
we are “training...a race of young exterminators”
by using nature without a second thought at to its value. Why, he asks,
should we expect adults to want to save the environment when they grew
up dissecting frogs as if they had no more value than a diagram? We
must instead raise our children with an understanding that all life
deserves our respect.
The next step according to Aldo Leopold is to come to the realization
that material goods do not make us happy. Our minds are polluted by
capitalism, a system that seeks to make us believe that we need
something we can actually live quite easily without in order for
someone else to make a profit. These ideas spill over into
conservation, causing people to keep a field only to graze livestock or
preserve a forest purely for its value in timber.
In America, Leopold says, we are obsessed with property rights and
ownership. This gives us the false sense that the land is something we
can use up until it is no longer valuable. This, however, is not the
case. He says that there are no boundaries to nature, it is all
connected as part of the same “fabric.” Because of
this we have a responsibility as stewards of the land, to preserve it
since it is connected to everyone around us. To damage our little piece
of this earth is to hurt everyone. “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.” It is the duty of every land owner in the country
to care for the little bit of earth they have the privilege of owning.
This stewardship must extend to all lands, not just pristine
wilderness. Aldo Leopold valued every place as an equal part to the
whole. To him, “wilderness was a state of mind rather than a
description of a place” (Knight and Riedel, 58). Although
much of New England was once cleared for farming, the current
inhabitants love the damp forests and sunny meadows as wild places.
This is true of our own Nature Preserve. The wetlands were once
bulldozed to make way for an athletic field and the trees were not
there too long ago, cut down to allow dairy cows to graze. Regardless
of the history of the area, it is valued as our own place to connect
with nature.
As stewards of the Nature Preserve and surrounding wild lands,
Binghamton University must protect an area cherished by thousands and
owned by everyone. We are an educational institution that must learn an
important lesson from someone else. The “earth, as the
primary educational establishment...with a record of extraordinary
success over some billions of years” is crying out to us
(Berry). If evolution has a direction of simple to complex then
symbiosis and altruism are the apex (Dish, 30).
References
Disch, Robert. The Ecological Conscience. Prentice Hall, Englewood
Cliffs, NJ, 1970.
Berry, Thomas. The Dream of Earth. Sierra Club Books, San Fransisco,
CA, 1988.
Hull, Fritz. Earth and Spirit. The Continuum Publishing Company, New
York, NY, 1993.
Knight, Richard and Suzanne Riedel. Aldo Leopold and the Ecological
Conscience. Oxford University Press, New York, NY, 2002.
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