Living Leopold: the land ethic and a new agrarianism

"The only progress that counts is on actual landscape of the back forty." - Aldo Leopold

In 2009, we will celebrate the centennial of the arrival of the great American conservationist Aldo Leopold in the Southwest as a ranger with the fledging U.S. Forest Service. Over the course of a remarkable and influential career, Leopold eloquently advocated a variety of critical conservation concepts, including wilderness protection, sustainable agriculture, wildlife research, ecological restoration, environmental education, land health, erosion control, biological holism, public welfare, private initiative, and, of course, a land ethic.

Each of these concepts resonates today - perhaps more so than ever as the conservation challenges of the 21st century grow more complicated, and more pressing. But it is Aldo Leopold's emphasis on the whole - soil, water, plants, animals and people together - that resonates most strongly today. The health of the whole, he argued, is dependent on its indivisibility. And the knitting force was a land ethic - the moral obligation we feel to protect soil, water, plants, animals, and people together.

After Leopold's death in 1946, however, the whole was broken into fragments by a rising tide of industrialism, consumerism, and prosperity. Even environmentalism played a role in the breakup of the world Leopold encountered a century ago by cleaving nature from work and isolating the ecological from the economic. Its aggressive campaign against ranching, for example, contradicted Leopold's integrated and comprehensive vision of conservation.

Fortunately, by the turn of the 21st century a scattered but concerted effort was underway to knit the whole back together, beginning where it matters most - on the back forty. Leopold's call for a land ethic is the root of what is being called a new agrarianism, an intermixing of ranchers, farmers, conservationists, scientists and others who aim to create a regenerative economy that works in harmony with nature. It starts with land health and food production, the foundations of ecological and human well-being, and extends to riparian restoration, progressive livestock management, organic farming, and biodiversity protection, among many other activities. Leopold is the spiritual mentor to this hopeful effort.

In this `practitioners' Conference, we will feature farmers, ranchers, scientists and conservationists who are "living Leopold" today - people who are implementing his vision of a land ethic on the back forty. Ultimately, the goal of the Conference is to facilitate, and possibly speed up, the knitting process. We need a new `whole' - and quickly. We can start by reinvigorating the land ethic and inaugurating an annual celebration of the new agrarianism. The event will incorporate six themes: (1) Land Health; (2) Conservation; (3) Sustainable Agriculture; (4) Wildlife and Restoration; (5) Beauty; and (6) the Land Ethic. Each theme will be motivated by a Leopold quote and each speaker will discuss the land ethic in their lives and how a new agrarianism works.