p.21 "Land health," Leopold wrote in 1944, "is the capacity for self-renewal..." "Health
expresses the cooperation of the interdependent parts..." he had written two years earlier. "It implies collective self-renewal
and collective self-maintenance."
p.22-23 "[T]he health of the land as a whole... is what needs conserving. Land, like other
things, has the capacity for self-renewal (i.e. for permanent productivity) only when its natural parts are present, and functional..."
...Leopold described healthy land as "stable," not to suggest that natural systems were static but in the more specific sense
of land that retained its ability to cycle nutrients effectively and thus maintain its soil fertility... Leopold used
"stability" and "integrity" in tandem as a shorthand expression for land health
p.30 They [Aldo Leopold and Wendell Berry] also fostered a sense that land use was good only when it sustained
the health of that community... Land health was "the one value," the one "absolute good" that upheld the entire web of life.
p.67 The known needs to be blended with the unknown... knowledge-based decision making is unproblematic.
p.113 To the extent that there is an overall goal today for land conservation (defining
land broadly as before), it is likely to be, most people would say, sustainability or some similar
term that includes the adjective sustainable.
p.120 How do we sustain something that is inherently dynamic? ...There must be some thing
that is to be sustained.
p.121 As defined in Our Common Future, sustainable development looks not at
nature... but instead at the satisfaction of human needs and aspirations.
p.127 Real environments, it turns out, are complex, interconnected, and dynamic
p.127 John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern gave this field observation [that high populations
of one desired species could degrade the habitat for other species] a mathematical grounding in 1947. In an interlinked
system, they showed, it is possible to maximize only one variable at a time. As biologist-philosopher David Ehrenfeld
put it, we cannot make everything "best" simultaneously.
p.128 Conservation, Leopold claimed... should be about keeping the entire land community healthy and functioning
p.132 Nature, it was being discovered, was more dynamic, more interwoven, and more unfathomable than people
had realized.
p.153-154 Inevitably, decisions about land use and consumption are made behind
veils of ecological ignorance... Somehow, decision-making processes need to take into account this
limited knowledge. It is dangerous to act based solely on what is known when that knowledge is obviously incomplete...
To fill in the gaps of our knowledge... Deep-seated intuition needs to be drawn upon... Because mistakes are inevitable,
it is prudent to leave room for second chances.
p.157 These three categories - overall utility, ethical considerations, and ignorance-precaution
- provide a framework for thinking about good and bad land use
p.161 Many aspects of human utility depend in practice on the preferences that people embrace. Science
can inform our preference-setting processes, but it cannot on its own establish the preferences. The bottom line:
human utility is determined by drawing extensively upon nonscientific factors... Science is a way to find
facts, not to establish ethical norms.
p.161-162 Science deals with the known, not with the unknown... precaution ultimately is
a prudential consideration, not a scientific fact. It is a way of dealing with ignorance and the inevitable errors
in human calculations. It is not at root a principle of science.
p.181 As for the term health, it conveys positive connotations... what would it mean for
a particular landscape to be truly healthy, and how can we promote it?
p.181 Health denotes a state of affairs that is flourishing and properly
functioning, free of disease or serious defect.
