Welcome to our course on Environmental Management and Ethics.
Today I would like to introduce you to land ethics.
My name is Steffen Foss Hansen.
I'm an associate professor at
the Technical University of Denmark at the Department of Environmental Engineering.
Land ethics was formulated by Aldo Leopold.
In the 1949 in his famous "A Sand County Almanac".
Aldo Leopold is acknowledged by many as the father of wildlife conservation in America.
Land ethics relies on a set of fundamental principles.
The first one is that the existing ethical theories deal only
with individuals as members of a community and not as part of a community.
Land ethics argues or Aldo Leopold argues that the boundaries of
the community should be enlarged to also include the land.
We have to change from being conquerors of
the land community to plain members and citizens of the land.
The argument is, or the guiding principle of land ethics is,
that "a thing," it might be a mismanagement,
it might be invention of use,
it might be extraction of resources,
that "a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity,
stability, and beauty of the biotic community."
And "it's wrong when it tends otherwise."
So that's the fundamental guiding principle by which actions and
by mismanagement actions can be judged of
what whether they're good or whether they are bad.
If they preserve the integrity and the beauty of the land,
the biotic community, then they're good.
If they're otherwise, they're considered bad from an- land ethical perspective.
The land is not just the soil on which the land is built.
It's the foundation and it's considered the fountain of energy in land ethics.
The energy that flows through a circuit of soil plants and animals.
Plants absorb energy from the sun.
This energy again flows to the biotic circuit represented by
a pyramid consisting of
different layers something that we would normally call the food chains.
The food chains then conduct energy upwards
and death and decay returns it to the soil again.
And in that sense you have a biotic pyramid that's known as the land pyramid.
There is a number of threats to the land pyramid.
It might be changes in the composition of flora and fauna.
It might be the substitution of native species by domestic species.
It might be agricultural overdraft of the soil.
It might be something like transport of animals and plants.
It might be changes to the water body.
But basically it boils down to two fundamental issues.
The first one,can the land adjust for itself to the new order?
And second, can the desired alterations be achieved by a less violent approach?
So that's something to always consider when you have
a given some management issue at hand.
If you want adhere to land ethics
these two important questions are important to kind of reflect upon.
Can the land adjust itself to the new order?
And can the desired alterations be achieved by less violence?
There's only a few good examples of I would say
land ethics applied in current day situations.
One example that we have identified is what is known as the Houting Project.
The Houting is almost extinct in Denmark or was almost extinct in Denmark.
So the Danish government decided to invest almost 14 billion euros
into the restoration of favourable conservation status of
the Houting in four Danish river systems.
The restoration turned out to have
a very profound positive effect on all components of the river systems,
the ecosystems including the conservation of the Houting.
But in itself the restoration activities involve no direct economical gain for Denmark.
And in that sense one could say that this is a nice example of applied land ethics.
The restoration and the preservation of the Houting was something that was
done in order to keep the overall composition of the land period intact, pyramid intact.
There was no economical gain whatsoever in protecting the Houting so to speak.
Another example from Denmark is that what is known as the Hazel dormouse bridge.
In 2008 the Danish Road Directorate decided to
build a bridge across the Svendborg freeway.
The overall cost of building
this fauna passage across the freeway was about 2.5 million euros.
Simply the built- the bridge was built in order to create a passage between
different faunas and between different areas where the Hazel Dormouse was known to live.
After four years still no signs have
been shown that the Hazel Dormouse has actually crossed the bridge.
But however, it's a nice example of how
non-economical motives have actually guided decision making in this process.
And so far there's been
no economical activities or instead of associated with the building of the bridge.
It should be mentioned that the Hazel Dormouse is a very
rare in Denmark and it's protected by the European Habitats Directive.
Thank you very much for your attention.
