A Sand County Almanac
The founding text of the land ethic, and the source of a way of thinking this corpus is named after. In Thinking Like a Mountain, Leopold describes shooting a wolf as a young man and reaching her in time to watch what he calls a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. The essay is what he concluded decades later: that with the wolves gone, the deer multiplied, browsed the mountain bare, and starved anyway, so that the mountain has reason to fear its deer as the deer fear the wolf. The intervention was locally rational, immediately satisfying, and disastrous at a scale and timeframe the intervener could not see. That is second order effects stated as well as anyone has stated them, and it is the argument underneath this corpus's scepticism about interventions that improve a measure while degrading the system that produced it. The other half is the land ethic itself: that ethical standing should extend to the biotic community, and that a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of that community. Read organisationally, the move is from managing parts toward membership of something one is inside rather than above, which is the same relocation Cilliers argues for on epistemological grounds. Two honest cautions. Stability in Leopold's formulation carries an equilibrium assumption that Holling would complicate twenty four years later, and the two should be read against each other rather than merged. And the wilderness ideal Leopold helped establish has been substantially criticised for treating long inhabited and actively managed land as pristine, erasing the indigenous presence that shaped it. The essay is a better guide to consequences than the ethic is to politics.
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