Leopold’s Land Ethic, Codified into Constitutional Law?

Two years into leftist president Rafael Correa's term, Ecuadoreans are today voting on whether to adopt a new constitution that reflects Correa's ambitious agenda. If enacted -- and all signs are that it will be -- the 444-article document would become the nation's 20th constitution.

I don't presume any particular knowledge of Ecuador's politics or to be remotely qualified to judge the overall merits of this sprawling document, but I will say that in at least one respect it appears to be a first of historic and global significance. The new constitution would grant nature itself certain inalienable rights; see this Christian Science Monitor article for textof the five articles spelling out these rights. And it would give communities, elected officials and private individuals legal standing in the Ecuadorean courts to defend nature's constitutional rights.

I'd missed this story until the EcoWorldlyblog over at Green Options resurfaced it a few days back, for which I'm grateful. Poking around the Web, I find an editorialor two and a few blogpostsremarking positively on the potential legal significance of the document. And there's plenty of knee-jerk, vitriolic froth from the unfettered-capitalism crowd. I haven't seen much comment that directly addresses the sea change in ethics, and worldview, inherent in granting constitutional rights to ecosystems.

If Ecuador votes yes, it will in effect become the world's first nation to codify a "land ethic," asAldo Leopold called it, into constitutional law. It's just really intriguing tos ee an everything-is-connected, ecosystem-aware ethic become an area of constitutional law -- like a feature of some futurist's vision of what a more evolved humanity might look like in a few hundred years.

To my knowledge, no one has ever articulated how society might claim a land ethic as compellingly as Leopold did nearly 60 years ago, in A Sand County Almanac. I'm moved to share a few bits from the last chapter:

[The] extension of ethics ... is actually a process in ecological evolution. Its sequence may be described in ecological as well as in philosophical terms. An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct ... [there is a] tendency of interdependent individuals or groups to evolve modes of co-operation ... Politics and economics are advanced symbioses in which the original free-for-all competition has been replaced, in part, by co-operative mechanisms with an ethical content.

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The first ethics dealt with the relation between individuals; ... later accretions dealt with the relation between the individual and society.

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There is as yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land ... is still property. The land relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but no obligations.

The extension of ethics to this third element in human environment is, if I read the evidence correctly, an evolutionary possibility and an ecological necessity. It is the third step in a sequence. The first two have already been taken. Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of land is not only inexpedient but wrong. Society, however, has not yet affirmed their belief.

An ethic may be regarded as a mode of guidance for meeting ecological situations so new or intricate, or involving such deferred reactions, that the path of social expediency is not discernible to the average individual. Animal instincts are modes of guidance for the individual in meeting such situations. Ethics are possibly a kind of community instinct in-the-making.

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. His instincts prompt him to compete for his place in that community, but his ethics prompt him also to co-operate (perhaps in order that there may be a place to compete for).

The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.

In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such.

In human history, we have learned (I hope) that the conqueror role is eventually self-defeating. Why? Because it is implicit in such a role that the conqueror knows, ex cathedra, just what makes the community clock tick, and just what and who is valuable, and what and who is worth-less, in community life. It always turns out that he knows neither, and this is why his conquests eventually defeat themselves.

In the United States, we have a handful of core environmental laws -- the Wilderness Act, Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, NEPA, Endangered Species Act, Marine Mammal Protection Act, a few others -- that provide our society with some safeguards against bad actors. These laws are the crowning achievements of the first generation of the environmental movement, and they have proved to be durable and incredibly important. As someone who for six years helped NRDC with communications across the full range of the institution's issues, I had a close-up view of the Bush administration's withering, sustained attacks on numerous specific applications of these laws and on the laws themselves. Now that this dark era is drawing to a close, it's clear that these laws -- and the environmental community's tireless defense of them -- kept the damage from becoming much, much worse than it could have been.

If its people make this new constitution the land of the land, Ecuador might just be setting the bar for us in the States. We're all in this boat together, facing challenges from climate disruption to overfished oceans to the end of oil. As unlikely as it seems right now, maybe I will in my lifetime see a land ethic -- a serious commitment to shared values like humility, respect for others, and the acceptance of responsibility for the condition of the commons -- codified as an amendment to the U.S. constitution. I can only hope that as a people we grow wise enough to make it happen.