The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.

This sounds simple: do we not already sing our love for and obligation to the land of the free and the home of the brave? Yes, but just what and whom do we love? Certainly not the soil, which we are sending helter-skelter downriver. Certainly not the waters, which we assume have no function except to turn turbines, float barges, and carry off sewage. Certainly not the plants, of which we exterminate whole communities without batting an eye. Certainly not the animals, of which we have already extirpated many of the largest and most beautiful species. A land ethic of course cannot prevent the alteration, management, and use of these 'resources,' but it does affirm their right to continued existence, and, at least in spots, their continued existence in a natural state.

A Sand County Almanac, and Sketches Here and There, 1948, Oxford University Press

The man widely identified as the father of wildlife management in America is Aldo Leopold. He belongs essentially to the middle generation of that transition period from a utilitarian to an ecological approach to conservation. Just before his death, he finished his now-famous essay "The Land Ethic." More than any other piece of writing, this work signaled the arrival of the Age of Ecology; indeed, it would come to be regarded as the single most concise expression of the new environmental philosophy. It brought together a scientific approach to nature, a high level of ecological sophistication, and a biocentric, communitarian ethic that challenged the dominant economic attitude toward land use.

In 1924, chiefly through his efforts, more than a half- million acres in New Mexico's Gila National Forest were so designated.

When his book Game Management appeared in 1933 it made clear that Leopold had grown more uneasy than ever with his own controlled-environment ideal. He tried to argue there that cropping was only a preliminary to a more advanced relation to the land, a higher stage in man's "moral evolution" that would one day follow.

As yet, though, he had not been able to define for himself exactly what that more capable culture or attitude should be. Hence he was forced to speak vaguely of "that new social concept toward which conservation is groping."

In that same year, 1933, Leopold also published an essay entitled "The Conservation Ethic," which gives some notion of where his own gropings were leading. In it he continued to speak of "controlled wild culture or 'management,'" of cropping, and of "industrial forestry." But he also criticized the attitude that land is merely property, to be used in whatever way its owner liked. "The land-relation," he complained, "is still strictly economic, entailing privileges, but not obligations." One of the essay's subheadings read "Ecology and Economics." Already he had begun to think of the two as not altogether compatible,- he was moving away from the view of conservation as resource supply-and-demand toward an attempt "to harmonize our machine civilization with the land whence comes its sustenance"—toward "a universal symbiosis."²⁹

According to Leopold's biographer, Susan Flader, this conversion to an ecological basis did not become complete until 1935, when he joined with others to form the Wilderness Society. It was also in that year that he saw firsthand the intensely artificial German methods of management, which he disliked so much that he grew wary even of his own inclination toward regulated landscapes. And during that watershed year, too, he found an old, abandoned shack near Baraboo, Wisconsin, where until his death he would at odd moments live the life of a Gilbert White or Henry Thoreau—a rural naturalist living apart from a technological culture, seeking to intensify his attachment to the earth and its processes. Henceforth Leopold's chief concern was the need to reestablish a personal, coexisting relation with nature, rather than the large-scale, impersonal management of resources by a professional elite.