Crossing the Internal Frontiers - Agri-culture: Reconnecting People, Land and Nature - page 172

This is the glorious key to whole landscape redesign - the creation of
places where we would really like to live in espérance . 3
Most of the main principles for redesign are present in this story. There
is leadership from a hero, someone willing to take a risk, to do something
different for the benefit of others. There is ecological literacy, with know-
ledge about the particulars of local agroecology helping to shape actions.
There is the building of social and natural assets as foundations for life
and for sustainability. There is also a sense of how long it takes, but just
how good are the rewards. However, the shepherd is a loner and achieves
change only on a small scale. This new agricultural sustainability revol-
ution will not happen all at once. It will take time, and require the coord-
inated efforts of millions of communities worldwide. But of one thing
we should no longer be in any doubt. This is the way forward, and it offers
real hope for our world and its interdependent people and biodiversity.
An Ethic for Land, Nature and Food Systems
Aldo Leopold's masterpiece, Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There ,
was published in 1949, a year after his death. His greatest contribution
to us all was the idea of the land ethic. This is a proposal for an ecological,
ethical and aesthetic science to shape human interactions with, and as a
part of, nature. Leopold's land ethic sets out the idea that the beauty and
integrity of nature should be protected and preserved from our actions.
Ethics is about limits to freedoms. We are free to destroy nature (and we
do), yet we should prescribe and accept certain limits. Leopold sees
humans as part of nature, not separated as distant observers or meddlers.
In the Sand County Almanac , he says:
We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see
land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and
respect. . . That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land
is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.
Such an ethic should be 'a differentiation of social and anti-social conduct'.
This land ethic implies thinking of land and community as a connected
network of parts, which includes us as humans, and in which each element
possesses intrinsic rights. There are many different views of this land ethic:
some say it is visionary, others that it is dangerous nonsense. But the point
remains that most people in industrialized countries still see nature as a
bundle of resources that are separate from us. Thus, the land ethic remains
radical, more than half a century after it was woven together by Leopold. 4