p.23-32
p.23 In our view, conservation would be well served by an updated variant of "land health,"
Aldo Leopold's ecologically grounded goal... should set the essential terms of how we live and enjoy the earth, providing the
framework within which we pursue our many... aims.
p.24 Our thesis is that sustainability has grave defects as a
conservation goal and ought to be replaced... sustainability is not a freestanding goal
so much as an attribute of the means used to achieve a goal... what is it that, over the long term, we are
supposed to sustain...?
p.24 Conservationists need to get their act together... crafting an overall
vision of what is to be accomplished... an appealing vision of a life in which people prosper on the land
p.26 "[T]he health of the land as a whole," he wrote in 1946, "rather than
the supply of its 'constituent resources,' is what needs conserving" (Leopold 1946), with land defined broadly
p.26 Real environments are complex, interconnected and dynamic,
and influenced by more factors than humans can monitor and synthesize.
p.26 In an interlocked system at a given time, it is possible to
maximize only one variable. We cannot, as David Ehrenfeld has observed, make everything "best" simultaneously (Ehrenfeld
1978).
p.28 ecologists must decide what types of data they want [to collect]...
Who is to say, however, that these data bits are the most helpful and revealing?
p.28 nature is far too complex for us to understand completely, which means
that we have no choice but to simplify it in our minds.
p.28 When we deal with nature we deal with real places, yet inevitably
we are guided in our dealings by our mental understandings... Science brings the real and the mental into closer
alignment by improving our understanding of the real. The more attentive we are to nature, the more our mental understanding
of it approximates the real thing
p.29 As humans we can manipulate our social constructions however we like.
But our manipulations have nothing to do with real nature. What they affect is how we perceive nature, value it, and simplify
it in our minds.
p.29 Leopold... called on his colleagues to develop a single conservation goal... Leopold gave his
goal the name "land health," by which he meant a vibrant, fertile, self-perpetuating community of life that included
people, other life forms, soils, rocks, and waters (Leopold 1944, 1949; Newton 2004).
Land health "expresses the cooperation of the interdependent parts," Leopold asserted;
"it implies collective self-renewal and collective self-maintenance" (Leopold 1942).
p.30 Conservation, we believe, needs a better goal than sustainability, or sustainable development, or any
other variant of the term... In our view, no term offers more promise than health, which connotes
that kind of vigorous flourishing... Health is an attribute, not of an organism
in isolation, but of an organism integrated into a biotic community... Health... needs to include
healthy relationships, cycles, and functions.
Properly grounded in ecology... land health can serve as conservation's overall goal...
without a separate, ecologically grounded goal, how can we even measure whether we are interacting with nature in healthy,
enduring, ethically sound ways?
Land health, we realize, will not be easy to define, and it very much needs definition... Land
health is plainly a goal (an end) rather than a means... A useful start, though, would be to cast aside sustainability
and begin talking about its replacement.
