Notes

Ecology plays a privileged role in environmental ethics. Aldo Leopold and Rachel Carson were two pioneering environmental ethicists with advanced training in ecology, and this profoundly influenced their moral vision of the natural world. Leopold was an ecologist, farmer, forester and conservationist who wrote explicitly about human moral duties to nature. He was the first to articulate a land ethic, or to describe moral responsibilities for land. His most important book was "A Sand County Almanac" (Leopold, 1949). In his chapter on a land ethic he claimed: "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." This appears to be the first explicit ethical statement about the importance of an ecosystem. Leopold expanded the boundaries of what was morally considerable from human society to include biological communities.