Leopold's land ethic is now 75 years old - does it stand the test of time?

Using an approach grounded in environmental ethics and the history and philosophy of science, Roberta Millstein offers a new interpretation and defense of Leopold’s land ethic in light of contemporary ecology. Despite the enormous influence of the land ethic, it has sometimes been dismissed as either out-of-date or ethically flawed. Millstein argues that these dismissals are unfounded—they are based on problematic interpretations of Leopold’s ideas. In this virtual program, she provides new, more defensible interpretations of the central concepts underlying the land ethic: interdependence, land community, and land health. She also offers a fresh interpretation of his argument for extending our ethics to include land communities as well as Leopold-inspired guidelines for how the land ethic can steer conservation and restoration policy.

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Roberta L. Millstein is Professor Emerit in the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Davis and is a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. She is a co-editor of Mechanism and Causality in Biology and Economics with Hsiang-Ke Chao and Szu-Ting Chen. Her open access book, The Land Is Our Community: Aldo Leopold’s Environmental Ethic for the New Millennium, will be published by the University of Chicago Press in July 2024. She has published widely in academic journals on the history and philosophy of ecology and evolution as well as environmental ethics. She is co-editor of the peer-reviewed open-access online journal Philosophy, Theory, and Practice in Biology and serves on the editorial boards for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and the journal Philosophy of Science.

The Land is Our Community: Leopold's Environmental Ethic for the New Millenium