biotic community

That is, assuming the wildflower's rarity contributes more to the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community than does some human, the land ethic clearly endorses sacrificing the human in a case of mortal conflict.

The program allies with the writing of aural historian Jack Loeffler, who posits that the watershed is a commons for the biotic community it cradles and sustains.

Riparian habitat, in turn, beckoned beavers, butterflies, songbirds, trout, and other members of the biotic community that had disappeared or declined due to predator eradication, in a process scientists describe as "trophic cascades."

(47) In particular, the intentional introduction of a revived species into a biotic community of which it was never a constituent might be regarded as necessarily a degradation of native biotic communities and natural ecosystems, akin to an invasive species that makes the existing community ostensibly less authentic.

Nonetheless, the species is absent from most of Arizona's desert grassland, which is a semidesert grassland biotic community within a temperate climate (Brown, 1994a; McClaran and Van Devender, 1995).

One of Leopold's most endearing ideas came from this book, that of the "land ethic," the moral imperative that "a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." This is the responsibility Leopold thought we all had towards nature, and it spawned the conservationist movement as we know it today.

Activities, such as fly fishing, that encourage people to engage with the biotic community around them also encourage the acquisition of the basic ecological understanding that allows people who are not professionally trained to make the essential leaps of logic necessary to give reasonable well-thought consideration to the environmental arguments presented by "experts." Among fly fishers, this tends to extend beyond specific watersheds towards a general respect for the biotic community as a whole.

He proposed a dramatic change in how we view and relate to the natural world, advocating a "land ethic" based on preserving the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community His 1925 American Forests' magazine article, "The Last Stand of the Wilderness," became the basis for American Forests' national campaign for wilderness preservation.

I have looked at the traditional farm as a kind of intermediary between the family and the putative biotic community. The farm cannot constitute robust ethical republics because of the limits constraining exchange of information and exchange of needs among its parts.

But later, he saw his role, and indeed that of the human species as a whole, not as conqueror of and director over nature, but as just "plain member and citizen" of the biotic community. Leopold wrote in A Sand County Almanac (1949) that land "is not merely soil; it is a fountain of energy flowing through a circuit of soils, plants, and animals.

He would be helped immensely by wrestling with Christian thinkers such as Holmes Rolston, who expouse theocentrism and who understand that this world may be anthropo-apical (i.e., humans have the highest value of any organism in the biotic community), but nevertheless that there are legitimate limits on what may be done to God's creatures, and the uses to which they may be put.

An agriculture is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. Thompson argues that agriculture is the most thoroughly invasive and disruptive of all human impacts upon natural ecosystems.