From a historical perspective, perhaps the most important lines written in defense of an environmental ethic are from Aldo Leopold's famous 1949 essay "The Land Ethic." Consider just three brief passages:

      "The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land . . . a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land- community to plain member and citizen of it."

      "It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value; I mean value in the philosophical sense"

      "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise"

      These simple but powerful passages constitute a classic statement of three contemporary precepts of environmental ethics: (1) Humans are co-members of the ecological community; (2) Humans should love and respect the land; and, (3) It is wrong to destroy the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. Indeed, it is difficult to see how any position which denies the sensibilities expressed in these three claims could constitute a bona fide environmental ethic.

      Of course, the historical significance of Leopold's "Land Ethic" does not thereby secure it as the only, or best, or even most appropriate statement of an environmental ethic. Within the Western philosophical tradition alone, there are a variety of well-known positions which challenge Leopold's land ethic. Reformist positions such as Peter Singer's utilitarian and Tom Regan's rights-based animal liberationism, as well as Paul Taylor's Kantian-based deontological "respect for nature" ethic, object (albeit on different grounds) to the failure of a Leopoldian land ethic to take seriously the sentiency, moral rights, or moral considerability of individual animals. Leopold's defense of hunting on apparently consequentialist grounds ("A thing is right when it tends to..."), without consideration of any morally relevant characteristics or individual animals, is viewed as conceptually flawed. Radical positions such as deep ecology, ecofeminism, social ecology, and bioregionalism object to "The Land Ethic" for its failure to challenge the deep conceptual roots of anthropocentric environmental thinking: e.g., oppositional value dualisms (such as nature/culture), ideologies and institutions of power and privilege, and capitalist competitive models of exchange.

      Although I share many of these concerns, as an ecofeminist philosopher reflecting upon the legacy of Leopold's land ethic, I continue to be struck by the insight that is the opening sentence of "The Land Ethic":

      "When god-like Odysseus returned from the wars in Troy, he hanged all on one rope a dozen slave-girls of his household whom he suspected of misbehavior during his absence. This hanging involved no question of propriety. The girls were property. The disposal of property was then, as now, a matter of expedience, not of right and wrong."

      I remember when I first read that line in 1973 . . . I was a philosophy graduate student in a virtually all-male department, writing a doctoral dissertation in a field too young yet to have a name, on a topic deemed by fellow analytic philosophers to be outside the boundaries of professional respectability. Yet I persevered, and nearly twenty-five years later, I vividly recall the profound sense of awakening I felt when I read that opening line.

      Unlike Leopold, I went on to develop a different position, ecofeminism, which explores important connections between the domination of women, people of color, children, the poor, Third World and indigenous peoples, and the domination of nonhuman nature. Unlike Leopold, I went on to argue that an environmental ethic which fails in theory or practice to reflect ecofeminist insights into the nature of these connections is inadequate. Still, it was Leopold's description of land as property and his association of land with "slave-girls" which first inspired me to think not only about "an ethic, ecologically" but about the gendering of human-nonhuman relationships.

      For so many like myself, "The Land Ethic" began what is now a global, interdisciplinary exploration in the field of environmental ethics. That's a remarkable legacy.

      Karen J. Warren is professor and Chair of Philosophy, Macalester College and is currently completing a book, Ecofeminism: A Philosophical Look on What It Is and Why It Matters.

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