This issue of Reflections is devoted to the land ethic of Aldo Leopold, a well-known forester, wildlife management expert, ecologist, and nature writer who died in a tragic accident, fifty years ago, in Wisconsin. Leopold's land ethic has provided one conceptual foundation for the discipline of environmental ethics and is widely influential in the environmental sciences. His ethical ideas are actively discussed by thousands of students of conservation and by practitioners in forestry, fisheries, ecology, wildlife management, and conservation biology. Philosophers who teach courses in environmental philosophy, and who debate philosophical conceptions about human relationships to nature, often refer to Leopold's ethic as one fruitful source for illuminating those relationships.

      The most mature formulation of Leopold's land ethic occurs in his book, A Sand County Almanac (1949). While Leopold regularly published bits and pieces of his ethic in professional journals as early as the 1930s, his ideas went largely unnoticed in popular culture until A Sand County Almanac was republished in an inexpensive paperback edition in 1966. By Earth Day 1970 it had become the "new testament" of the environmental movement in the United States. It elegantly tied together diverse themes and insights from ecology, natural history, the natural resource sciences, and ethics into a novel "holistic" philosophy about the conservation and preservation of the land or "biotic community." Leopold argued for new attitudes and values to harmonize our personal behavior and environmental practices in industrial societies with the ecology of the earth, and he delineated some of the important ingredients of the "environmental ethic" that many Americans believe our society so badly needs. As one observer has noted, A Sand County Almanac combined a "scientific approach to nature, a high level of ecological sophistication, and a biocentric, communitarian ethic that challenge(s) the dominant economic attitude toward land use" in industrial societies. To a large degree, he is responsible for bringing the provocative ideals of environmental ethics into public consciousness.

      This issue brings together a number of influential thinkers in the field of environmental ethics and conservation to comment on Leopold's ethical ideas. Authors were asked to highlight the significance of the land ethic, to commen t on its future as a paradigm for guiding decisions on natural resource use, or to critique its limits. The issue celebrates the spirit of Leopold's ethical legacy, while evaluating its effectiveness as a source of philosophical meaning and practical app lication.

      The essays reveal that Leopold's land ethic has had a substantial impact on the thinking of environmental philosophers. It has particularly inspired those whose goal is to lay out the philosophical dimensions of a "holistic" envir onmental ethic that draws on the scientific insights of ecology. His basic principle that an action is right that tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community draws special attention; it is variously praised, extended, reinterpreted, or criticized because philosophers understand that it could provide a significant substructure for newly conceived ethical obligations to nature. Leopold's correlative concept that the ethical community must be extended to include all of nature is also both applauded and critically analyzed because of its potential to revolutionize the human-centered ethical systems of western culture. These essays also reveal the penchant of philosophers to seek more precision and detail in the formula tion of an ethical system than Leopold was inclined to offer, while acknowledging the pivotal role of the land in initiating the field of environmental ethics.

      While Leopold's writings raise philosophical issues that require further interpretation, explanation, and debate, his aim was to help us see that, to use his metaphor, we are remodeling the Alhambra with a steam shovel, and that it is time for Americans to find a gentler way to alter the land that they profess to love and respect. His conservationist followers admire him for being an ethical prophet; they seek inspiration and confirmation of their activism. In this regard, the land ethic has served their purposes well.

      Peter List is a professor of philosophy at Oregon State University, where he teaches courses in environmental ethics and natural resource ethics. He is the editor of Radical Environmentalism (1993) and of a forthcoming b ook on environmental ethics and forestry.