ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I explore how city dwellers might develop an urban land ethic. Specifically, I argue that we need to develop a more fluid concept, one that includes the different locales in which we might live—past, present, and future—and that pays particular attention to an increasingly mobile society. As Aldo Leopold suggests, “Your true modern [citizen] is separated from the land by many middlemen, and by innumerable physical gadgets. He has no vital relation to it” (223). This claim is particularly true today: we are tethered to technology but not the land. The challenge becomes how to cultivate the “love, respect, and admiration for land” (224) so necessary for a land ethic? As Frank Gaughan notes,
Despite Leopold’s emphasis on local practices and amateur naturalism, the individuals that figure in much of his work seem distant from the life ways of typical city dwellers, whom Leopold laments as a “landless people” (“Land Pathology”). Today, however, we live in an era of landless people, with the majority of the world living in urban areas … How, then, shall this growing landless class interpret and apply Leopold’s work, so much of which employs examples drawn from agricultural and wilderness settings?
