Land Ethic and Aldo Leopold's Ecological Holism

The American forester, ecologist, and conservationist Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) articulated what remains the founding text of ecological holism in "The Land Ethic," the concluding essay of A Sand County Almanac, published posthumously in 1949 after Leopold's death fighting a grass fire on a neighbor's farm in Wisconsin. Leopold, who had earlier worked for the U.S. Forest Service and helped establish the first officially designated wilderness area, the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico, in 1924, proposes extending the boundaries of the moral community — which he traces historically as having expanded progressively from covering only the individual, to the family, to the tribe, to all of humanity — to include "soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land," conceived as a single interdependent biotic community rather than as a mere collection of resources for human use.