For nearly two decades, foresters and others with a keen interest in forests have been debating what form the ethics of American forestry should take. Some have argued that forestry needs to adopt a new land ethic based on ecological principles; others believe that this profession can make do with the ethical commitments it already has to land stewardship. The idea that forestry needs ethical reform is a reflection of larger debates in American society about the need for a new environmental ethic in society generally. Since the early 1960s, many have suggested that such an ethic is imperative if Americans are to change their excessively consumptive and destructive environmental behavior, and resolve the environmental problems they have brought on themselves.

      The call for a new environmental ethic has also led some to look into cultural and intellectual history for the philosophical wisdom on which to base new ethical ideas. This examination has naturally led to the discovery of Aldo Leopold's land ethic as one fruitful fountain of meaning, both for reconstructing social ethics and ethics in forestry. While Gifford Pinchot is usually acknowledged to have laid down the basic ethical principles of resource conservation in American forestry, Leopold's land ethic has more recently been invoked as the proper inspiration for a new forestry ethic that takes the long-term harmony between humans and forests more seriously.

      In the 1930s, Leopold experienced a "personal transmutation of values", broke away from his Pinchotian forestry roots, and developed a more broadly conceived and humbling idea of forestry as an ecological science and art that adopts a less "anthropocentric" and utilitarian attitude towards forests in favor of a more "biocentered" and aesthetic perspective. An ecologically based forestry, in his mind, could become a means for promoting land health, the ultimate aim of any form of land management, and for understanding non-economic and ecological values in forests. It could serve as one model of an applied science that leads land managers and land owners to a new, more holistic form of forest conservation. Leopold did not abandon Pinchotian forestry completely, because he still accepted such ideas as sustained yield, but he submerged and refashioned it into something I will call "biotic forestry", to use a variant of the term Leopold used for the new kind of farming he advocated in the 1930s.

      There is a key passage in A Sand County Almanac which is justly famous for revealing this new model of forestry: he tells us that there are two kinds of groups in forestry, the agronomic and the ecological. The first thinks of trees primarily as crops and makes forestry a kind of industrialized, production oriented agriculture concerned with creating tree farms or plantations to produce wood and wood products, the basic forest commodities. Some call this the "timber first" approach, a form of thinking still advocated today in American forestry. The second group, on the other hand, thinks of trees and other forest organisms and systems as naturally evolving objects and species, parts of various biota, integral components of a complicated biospheric energy system. This biotic conception makes forestry an applied ecological, aesthetic, and even economic discipline that is concerned with managing forest lands for economic products, of course, as well as for a whole series of other functions including wildlife, recreation, watersheds and water quality, wilderness, aesthetic values, the continuing development of ecological knowledge or wisdom, and, ultimately, forest land health. Foresters are not to aim only or exclusively at economic returns from forest products but at nurturing the long-term integrity and sustainability of forest ecosystems. Instead of forest profits above all else, Leopold thus proposed an ecosystem first approach in which foresters become "biotic citizens" and their professional roles expand and diversify considerably beyond the Pinchotian commercial and economic model. In Leopold's forestry, the forest does not get lost for the trees.

      While Leopold believed that a variety of forest wildernesses should be set aside in the United States, for many sound reasons, not the least of which is to preserve forest biodiversity and to maintain crucial ecological functions and services, his biotic forestry still requires active management of some forests. He realized that we would have to have wood products and economic profits, though he doubted that forest conservation could be successfully based on a profit model. In fact he evaluated these commercial uses of forests using an ecological standard and questioned their long-term effects on such things as the fertility and the microflora of forest soils. Clearly his model of forestry elevated forest integrity, ecology, and aesthetics over the extraction of wood or "fiber".

      Leopold was fully aware of how little we currently know about biotic systems and the complicated ecological functions of forests; he was sensitive about how much we have yet to learn and of how much we may never know. He was a true forestry conservative, one who actually believed that we should be much more humble and reserved in our many uses of forests. What is needed, he concluded, is a "gentle and restrained" forestry, one in which ethical concern for forest organisms is essential, not ignored or peripheral, in forest management. In my judgement, those foresters who side with Leopold's biotic forestry are more likely to lead this discipline toward thoughtful reform of its disputed land practices.

      Peter List is a professor of philosophy at Oregon State University and a member of the Society of American Foresters.

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