ABSTRACT
The Earth Ethic is informed less by ecology and evolutionary biology than by biogeochemistry and anticipates the Gaia Hypothesis, viz., that the Earth is, as a whole, a living being. If so, Aldo Leopold thought it a worthy object of moral respect. Aldo Leopold is often called a prophet, mainly because he was warning of the onslaught of an environmental crisis—although not by that name—more than a decade before Rachel Carson and Stewart Udall sounded the alarm. The paper in which Leopold faintly sketches the Gaia hypothesis and an associated Earth Ethic is innocuously titled "Some Fundamentals of Conservation in the Southwest." Leopold takes as his first task persuading his audience that the Earth is indeed a living being, and it is by that effort that Leopold anticipates the Gaia hypothesis. Ethics, as we know it, has assumed an atomistic ontology—moral agents and patients are thought to be individuals.
