ABSTRACT
Aldo Leopold, a naturalist and writer, produced perhaps the first formal statement on an environmental ethic. Bear in mind in reading this article that it was written in the 1930s, and that the idea of ethics applied to land, thus widening the moral community, was a revolutionary concept. In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. 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. Conservation is a state of harmony between men and land. One basic weakness is a conservation system based wholly on economic value. Lack of economic value is sometimes a character not only of species or groups, but of entire biotic communities: marshes, bogs, dunes and deserts are examples.
