ABSTRACT
Politics and economics are advanced symbioses in which the original free-for-all competition has been replaced by co-operative mechanisms with an ethical content. 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. Ethics are possibly a kind of community instinct in-the-making. The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land. An ethic to supplement and guide the economic relation to land presupposes the existence of some mental image of land as a biotic mechanism. The ‘key-log’ which must be moved to release the evolutionary process for an ethic is simply this: quit thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic problem. The chapter presents the pyramid as a symbol of land and develops some of its implications in terms of land-use.
