ABSTRACT

Aldo Leopold famously claimed that his land ethic involves individual responsibility for the health of the land. Having defi ned land health (Leopold, 1949, p221) as ‘the capacity of the land for self-renewal’, and conservation as ‘our eff ort to understand and preserve this capacity’, I set out to explore whether his land ethic and his related notion of land health, in particular, are suffi ciently robust to support three essential elements of sound public health policy. These essential elements are:

• the community health perspective, which links the health or disease of individual citizens to the overall responsibility of the larger community within which he or she lives and works;

• the holistic health perspective, which recognizes that the quality of a community’s sanitation, housing, potable drinking water, workplace safety, and so on, signifi cantly impacts the health and welfare of individual citizens; and

• the perspective of legal moralism, which acknowledges the liberty-limiting authority of the state to impose sanctions on individuals or corporations designed to promote sound health and safety practices and discourage harmful habits and practices (Carrick, 2007, p19-21).