“It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for it’s value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value; I mean value in the philosophical sense.“ (Aldo Leopold)
Leopold (1981) sees the development of an emotional relationship with land as a precondition for an ethical relationship with it. A cold blooded materialist might express scepticism about the idea of an emotional or an ethical relationship of the kind Leopold envisages. How, she might ask, could we develop an emotional attachment to indifferent, inanimate matter? Well, along with the insights of psychology, recent work in the phenomenology of space and place has further revealed just how deep our emotional relationships to our living environments can become. Last easter I read an article by a former tutor, Dylan Trigg, entitled 'Anonymous Materiality', in which he gave a phenomenological account of the return to a childhood home, which highlighted, among other things, the spectacle of the formerly intimate and friendly family home now appearing indifferent and anonymous, in its cold materiality. In short, human beings emphatically do create and maintain deep emotional relationships to space and place, though of course, these relationships are one-sided. We might remark further, that although these relationships may be emotionally negative, it is typically an affectionate relationship that develops towards the environments which reliably provide sustenance.
Granting the possibility of such emotional relationships, we can now ask why they would be a pre-condition for an ethical relationship. I think the answer is made fairly clear by analogy with ethical relationships between humans, which themselves seem to be largely based upon emotions such as compassion, empathy and love. It would almost seem like a commonplace to assert that ethical relationships are based on emotions rather than calculations.
So, we can now see why the instrumentalist view of nature, which is based on rational estimations of utility, is considered by Leopold, among others, to be fundamentally non-ethical. Perhaps such an attitude is also unethical (I take this latter to be a pejorative label, while 'non-ethical' is merely descriptive). The confirmation of this 'perhaps' will depend on the question of whether we 'ought' to hold an ethical relationship with nature - whether we should play up or play down our latent emotional relationships with it. Arguing for a Leopoldian response to this question could be done on the grounds of pragmatics - but to do this would be self-defeating, to remain within an instrumental perspective. The question is whether we should cultive a non-instrumental relationship with nature, and any answer of the form 'yes, so that...' fails to answer the question. I think the most promising approach, for a Leopoldian, may be that suggested by Thomas Hill (1983), which is to address the question somewhat indirectly, through the lens of virtue ethics. If virtues are characteristics we consider valuable in themselves, then we should not be surprised by our inability to supply satisfactory reasons for valuing them. In the present context, we might ask: would the kind of person we admire be someone who maintains an ethical relationship to the land?
References:
Hill, T. (1983) 'Ideals of Human Excellence and Preserving Natural Environments', Environmental Ethics 5, pp.211-24
Leopold, A. (1981) 'The Land Ethic' in A Sand County Almanac, (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp.237-65
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