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Ecologist Meets Economics: Aldo Leopold 1887-1948

By Craufurd D. Goodwin, Duke University

August, 2007

“Sometimes I think that ideas, like men, can become dictators. We

Americans have so far escaped regimentation by our rulers, but have we

escaped regimentation by our own ideas? I doubt if there exists today a more

complete regimentation of the human mind that that accomplished by our

self-imposed doctrine of ruthless utilitarianism. The saving grace of

democracy is that we fastened this yoke on our own necks, and we can cast

it off when we want to, without severing the neck.” Aldo Leopold, 1939

(1991, 259).

Introduction

Aldo Leopold was an American public servant and intellectual who became

widely famous mainly because of a slim volume of essays published

posthumously in 1949. When the essays were republished in paperback in

1968, just as the environmental movement was coming into full bloom, they

made Leopold a patron saint of the movement and best-selling author. He is

examined here not because he has been ignored and needs reintroduction;

quite the contrary, his works have been collected and republished (Leopold

1968, 1986, 1991, 1999), and there are in print an excellent biography

(Meine 1988) and some thoughtful interpretations of his ideas (Callicott ed.,

1987, and Nelson 2006). Leopold is interesting to economists because while

he was a founder of the new multi-disciplinary field of ecology he began his

career immersed in Benthamite utilitarian economic thinking and became

disillusioned only after finding it inadequate for dealing with the

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environmental issues that concerned him. In due course he suggested

alternative modes of analysis and policy solutions that were remarkably

prescient. Unlike some pioneering environmentalists, Leopold was more

than a moral critic attacking capitalism and the market economy as the cause

of degradation. He was a widely-read and balanced thinker attempting to

reach conclusions about policy problems using insights from whatever

disciplines seemed relevant to the question at hand.

Leopold came from German immigrant stock and spent a comfortable

middle class childhood in Burlington, Iowa, son of the owner of a successful

desk manufacturing company. He attended the Lawrenceville School in New

Jersey, the Sheffield Scientific School of Yale University (class of 1908) and

the Yale School of Forestry (master of forestry 1909). After graduation he

joined the United States Forest Service, founded only four years before. His

education at Yale was in one of the most advanced applied science programs

in the nation, separated from the “Academical Department” of Yale College

and with a distinctly practical bent (Barber 1988, 141). The program

attracted to its faculty a succession of distinguished political economists

including Daniel Coit Gilman, later the founding president of Johns Hopkins

University, who said “Never probably in the history of the country, was it

more desirable that the study of History, Law, Political Economy,

Philosophy, Literature and all the humanities should be kept up, and that

young men should learn to value the lessons of the past, and to take counsel

from the of wise men of every age and country” (Barber 1988, 142). In the

“select course” set up by Gilman and others in applied science “political

economy” was taught initially in the third year. Later it was taught over two

years in introductory and advanced classes. Gilman was replaced as teacher

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of political economy by Francis Amasa Walker, who went on to a

distinguished career at MIT, and then by William Graham Sumner, notable

especially for his belief in immutable laws that governed society, such as

natural selection and the survival of the fittest under a regime of laisser-faire.

By the 1870s students in the Scientific School received more instruction in

political economy than those in Yale College.

Young faculty who came to Yale later in the 19th century were mainly from

the “Sumner stable,” notably Arthur T. Hadley who arrived in 1879 as an

applied economist. In the 1890s Hadley replaced Sumner as the dominant

presence in political economy; he taught a large introductory class that

emphasized the principle of natural selection as the explanation for

economic growth, and marginal utility doctrine as the explanation for

individual behavior (Barber 1988, 160-161). By the end of the decade this

was the most popular course in the College. Although Hadley had moved on

to become President of Yale by the time Leopold arrived students continued

to learn their economics from Hadley’s popular text book Economics: An

Account of the Relations between Private Property and Public Welfare

(1896). There Benthamite doctrine was set forth theoretically – marginal

utility theory was described as fundamentally sound – and practically as it

applied to public policy. The successful entrepreneur was identified as the

best guide to the appropriate path of economic development. Hadley called

Bentham and Jevons “individualists” and the most persuasive analysts of the

modern economy. “The individualist views the pursuit of private wealth, not

as an end, but as a means to the general well- being of society. He shows

that the effort to make money is a most powerful incentive to work in the

service of the community – in fact the most powerful incentive the world has

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yet known; and that within certain limits the commercial success or failure

of an enterprise is dependent upon the question whether the community

needs it” (Hadley 1897 [1896], 16.). Hadley’s special field was railways

(Railroad Transportation 1885), and it would not have been difficult for the

young Leopold to see how the doctrine contained therein could be applied to

forest management.

It is worth reconstructing in outline the mixture of Benthamite and

Darwinian principles with which Leopold was imbued when he went off to

the Forest Service. Bentham’s message had been contained in his

Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, completed in 1780,

published in 1789, and revised and republished in 1823. He set forth several

propositions that became the foundation of modern micro-economics. First,

he said, “Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign

masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought

to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the

standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are

fastened to their throne” (Bentham 1948 [1823], 125). Behavioral postulates

of economic man could not be stated more clearly; from a positive

perspective man was expected to respond predictably only to pleasure and

pain, while normatively he was enjoined to do so. Other supposed

determinants of human behavior, such as Adam Smith’s notion of sympathy,

Bentham assured his readers, could safely be ignored (138-139).

The second powerful assertion made by Bentham was that the concept of

“community” is essentially meaningless, even dangerous, as a social

construct. “The interest of the community then is, what? – the sum of the

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interests of the several members who compose it” (136). For Bentham,

individuals, the rational actors who make up society, are the only meaningful

optimizing agents, and maximizing their collective quanta of happiness

should be the sole objective of government. “A measure of government

(which is but a particular kind of action, performed by a particular person or

persons) may be said to be conformable to or dictated by the principle of

utility, when in like manner the tendency to which it has to augment the

happiness of the community is greater than any which it has to diminish it”

(127). Presumably Bentham’s suspicion of the notion of “community

welfare” as distinct from the sum of individuals’ welfare, as a guide to the

formation of public policy, was derived from his experience with policies

and institutions that had Medieval and mercantilist roots and that while

professing concern for the public interest were really intended to benefit

particular individuals or classes, or the church.

Bentham’s third powerful assertion, derived essentially from the first two,

was that the only principle by which public policy should be guided is that

of the greatest utility for the greatest number, i.e. total pleasure minus total

pain. “If the principle of utility be a right principle to be governed by, and

that in all cases, it follows from what has been just observed, that whatever

principle differs from it in any case must necessarily be a wrong one” (132).

Nor was it reasonable or desirable to seek any other principle of behavior

than utility maximization. For example, “The principle of asceticism never

was, nor ever can be, consistently pursued by any living creature. Let but

one tenth part of the inhabitants of this earth pursue it consistently, and in a

day’s time they will have turned it into a hell” (136). Moreover, since

“pleasure” was “the only good” and motives naturally directed humans to

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pleasure, “it follows, therefore, immediately and incontestably, that there is

no such thing as any sort of motive that is in itself a bad one” (218). Human

actions, and the dispositions that led up to them, could be judged good or

bad depending on their tendency to increase or decrease human happiness

(246). But the motivations themselves should not be questioned.

A codicil to this doctrine that human motivations were not to be judged was

that human tastes should not be questioned. Who was to say that the

demands of one individual were inherently preferable to those of another?

Since aggregate welfare was simply the sum of the happiness of everyone,

imposition by one part of society of its tastes on another would reduce social

welfare. In his most famous discussion of this principle, concerning the

question of whether the arts should receive some kind of subsidy, he

concluded that they should not, because the effect would be to penalize other

forms of consumption, such as participation in innocent games. In essence,

“Pushpin equals poetry” in Bentham’s immortal phrase, and both should be

left to the market for the allocation of resources. (Bentham 1962, II, 251)].

Charles Darwin’s message, interpreted by Herbert Spencer, William Graham

Sumner and others, fitted well with Bentham’s ideas. Unfettered struggle

among optimizing individuals on both the demand and supply side of

competitive markets would yield the most desirable social outcomes. Those

who were most successful would see to the production of what was most

desired by themselves, and therefore most desirable for the community.

Interference in markets by government or monopolies would lead only to

reduction in social welfare.

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Leopold rose rapidly in the Forest Service, becoming supervisor of the

Carson National Forest in New Mexico in 1911. Ill health in 1913 forced

him to take a series of leaves and then a succession of desk jobs, ending as

associate director of the U. S. Forest Products Laboratory in Madison,

Wisconsin. In 1939 he joined the University of Wisconsin as Professor of

Game (later Wildlife) Management in the Department of Agricultural

Economics of the College of Agriculture. Leopold became a leader of a

relatively small coterie of foresters, biologists, and pioneers in the new field

of ecology, defined as the study of the relations between organisms and their

environment. Leopold’s work became associated with the “Wisconsin idea”

of public service through the academy, but there is no evidence that he

interacted with John R. Commons or the other Wisconsin institutional

economists of the day who were among the main proponents of this idea.

After his death in 1948 the collection of his essays published as A Sand

County Almanac and Sketches Here and There (1949) touched a nerve in a

large readership well beyond Wisconsin, and he joined the growing

pantheon of those who mobilized the public against threats to the

environment. Most of Leopold’s published and unpublished writings on

environmental matters were individually very brief, but when collected they

provide a remarkably clear picture of the evolution of his thought. Most of

his essays that deal with economic and social questions are contained in a

collection entitled The River of the Mother of God and Other Essays

(Leopold 1991) with titles like “A Criticism of the Booster Spirit” (1923),

“The Conservation Ethic,” (1933), “Conservation Ethics” (1933),

“Conservation Economics,” (1934), “Ecology and Politics,” (1941) and “The

Ecological Conscience” (1947).

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Leopold entered forestry at an exciting moment. The management of

national forest lands was transferred by President Theodore Roosevelt from

the Department of the Interior in 1905 to a new unit in the Department of

Agriculture, headed by Gifford Pinchot, a friend and Yale forestry graduate.

The term “national forests” was introduced in 1907, and the land area

managed by the Forest Service grew quickly from 56 million acres in 1905

to 117 million acres when Leopold came on board (the total stands at 193

million acres in 2007). Pinchot popularized the notion of conservation of the

forests, by which he meant using the forests to achieve “the greatest good for

the greatest number” over the long run, virtually a direct quote from

Bentham (Leopold 1991 [1921], 78). This utilitarian language remained

official Forest Service doctrine well into the 1920s (Leopold 1991 [1925],

131) and was seen as different from the “preservationist” ideas of John Muir

and others, accepted in the National Park Service, that the forests should

remain as much as possible untouched by human hand. But the question

persisted for the Forest Service of how to achieve the “greatest good” in

practice. It was agreed that land suitable for settlement should be dispersed

systematically to private owners and that which remained should be

exploited by both public and private bodies for timber production,

recreation, and other legitimate human uses. For the production of timber the

national forests were to be thought of as essentially a public utility, like a

water works, generating enough output for an expanding new nation moving

rapidly westward. Leopold accepted the “progressive” doctrine of Teddy

Roosevelt that conservation of renewable national resources, including

forests, required that their productive capacity not be reduced through

overuse. But the problem remained for Leopold and others on the ground of

converting this bold strategy into effective tactics. In particular, what if the

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national economy ran out of unused forest capacity and the supply of timber

reached a limit? There would have to be trade-offs, and how should these be

made without the guidance of the market? Here the concern of Leopold’s

Madison neighbor, the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, with the closing

of the American frontier came to the fore. Like others trained in the

principles of political economy in the nineteenth and early twentieth

centuries, Leopold saw the closing of the frontier as mainly a problem of

Ricardian diminishing returns. He wrote in 1932 of the Malthusian nemesis

of over-population: “when I father more than two children [which he did!] I

am creating an insatiable need for more printing presses, more cows, more

coffee, more oil, and more rubber, to supply which more birds, more trees,

and more flowers will either be killed, or what is just as destructive, evicted

from their several environments” (Leopold 1991 [1932], 165). Two years

before his death, at the end of World War II, Leopold was prepared even to

explain the recent global conflict in Malthusian terms. “In all species one is

impressed by one common character [istic ?]: If one means of reduction

fails, another takes over…. There is a striking parallelism between the

present world-wide strife, and the social status of an overpopulated muskrat

marsh just prior to catastrophe” (Leopold 1999 [1946], 225).

With these issues in mind, both short and long run, of how to construct a

domestic forest policy and how to address global problems of population

growth, Leopold turned to economic principles for answers.

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Economics as a Guide to Policy; The Legacy of Bentham

Even as a schoolboy Leopold speculated that from the evidence around him

there must be flaws in national land and forest policy. During his youth he

saw frontier farms with fertility destroyed and abandoned after one or two

generations. Moreover, mistreatment of the forests by the large timber

companies was readily apparent. He explained during a public speaking

contest in preparatory school: “The owners of forests quickly get what they

can by indiscriminate cutting and then cede the land back to the government

to avoid taxes. The government holds today hundreds of thousands of square

miles of such land, rendered a desert for years to come” (Leopold 1991

[1904], 38-39). Yet the young Leopold was reluctant to countenance radical

measures to solve these problems. Although the muckrakers and the media

had been attacking the large corporations effectively, Leopold was not ready

to join in and eject them from the forests. After listening to Jack London at

Yale, he read in the literature of socialism (Meine 1988, 58), but he seems

not to have been impressed. He said he preferred to read Darwin. He

remained respectful of property rights and, although a public servant for

much of his life, he was increasingly skeptical of the capacity of government

to solve problems, through what he described during the Great Depression as

“some trivial tinkering with the laws, some useless appropriation, or some

pasting of pretty labels on ugly realities” (Leopold 1991 [1933], 190). After

Yale, and exposure to formal economic principles, Leopold preferred to use

the market rather than public authority to deal with issues whenever

possible. His biographer suggests that his own predilections were consistent

with utilitarian dependence on individual initiative over collective action,

and it was not necessary for him to be persuaded by theory (Meine 1988,

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83). But why, Leopold asked, were there sometimes policy failures when

vigorous competitive markets were present? Perhaps, Leopold speculated,

they occurred because of too much attention to the short run, as Pinchot had

warned, and solutions could be found merely by changing the time horizon

of the incentive structure. But it was not long before he concluded that this

too was an inadequate analysis.

Leopold was a voracious and wide-ranging reader. His writings are filled

with references to nineteenth and twentieth century novelists, historians, and

philosophers, including John Stuart Mill (Meine 1988, 160, 183). He drew

inspiration from Greek and Roman authors and, even though not religious,

from the Bible (Meine 1988, 183). Sometimes this breadth drew criticism

from his superiors, as when one remarked as follows about his suggestion

that forest rangers could benefit as much from adult education in the liberal

arts as from more technical training. “The main object to accomplish as he

has seen the job is to cultivate man’s imagination by permitting him to

choose reading matter; for example, he thought and is right to a certain

degree that if a ranger reads a thesis on mythology (?) he would develop

imagination to assist him in his daily work” (Meine 1988, 191). But overall

Leopold’s thought processes seem very much like those of an economist. He

conceived of the Forest Service as primarily an agency charged with “the

protection and development” of America’s “resources,” to “increase the

efficiency” of land, labor, and capital. “In plainer English, our job is to

sharpen our tools, and make them cut the right way” (Meine 1988, 126). He

used familiar economic concepts when explaining to his forester colleagues

how to think about policy. For example, he pointed out that plans to increase

the production of some forest products often entailed social costs not

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included in market costs, and that these should be included in correct

calculations of real [opportunity] cost lest the market equilibrium be

different from the socially-optimal one. “The game-keeper buys an unnatural

abundance of pheasants at the expense of the public’s hawks and owls. The

fish-culturist buys an unnatural abundance of fish at the expense of the

public’s herons, mergansers, and terns. The forester buys an unnatural

increment of wood at the expense of the soil, and in that wood maintains an

unnatural abundance of deer at the expense of palatable shrubs and herbs”

(Leopold 1991 [1935], 228).

In 1942 in keeping with the Institutionalist economists of his day and the

evolutionary economics of Sumner, Leopold portrayed the modern

corporation as a rather mysterious entity subject to rapid evolutionary

change and requiring serious study. “One is apt to make the error of

assuming that a corporation possesses the attributes of a prudent person. It

may not. It is a new species of animal, created by mutation, with a

morphology of its own and a behavior pattern that will unfold with time.

One can only say that its behavior pattern as an owner of forests is so far not

very prudent” (Leopold 1991 [1942], 294). In the 1930s when in his own

surroundings Leopold faced the coincidental tragedies of the Great

Depression and the Dust Bowl, he toyed with the notion that cycles in nature

might be at the root of the ecological and economic problems, perhaps

sunspots as William Stanley Jevons had suggested. In 1931 Leopold took

part in a major conference on natural cycles at Matamek in Labrador, at

which no economists were present as far as is known and whose findings

were inconclusive (Meine 1988, 282-3).

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Unquestionably the most important economic concepts that Leopold used

repeatedly were competition and market equilibrium. Both of these he came

to appreciate from his training in economics and evolutionary biology. He

understood that forces of demand and supply were resolved in an economy

through price adjustment. But a single-minded focus on economic

equilibrium was for him at the root of many environmental problems. There

was, he explained, a biological system parallel to the economic system that

he called the “biota”, and it too needed to achieve equilibrium. He pictured

the biota in a triangular diagram reminiscent of the Physiocrats’ Tableau

Economique. The triangle represented an energy circuit, with soil on the

bottom and carnivores on the top (Leopold 1991 [1939], 268). Energy

flowed up as plants, insects, birds, rodents and other mammals were

consumed by those in the layers above. A biological equilibrium was

established parallel to an economic one with lines of connection like “the

arteries of a living thing – the land. In them circulate food drawn from the

soil, pumped by a million acts of cooperation and competition among

animals and plants” (303). A healthy biota was a fertile one. “Fertility is the

ability to receive, store, and return energy.” Trouble was experienced when

equilibria in the two systems were inconsistent. “Agriculture, by overdrafts

on the soil, or by too radical a substitution of domestic for native species in

the superstructure, may clog the channels of flow or deplete storage. Soils

depleted of their stores wash away faster than they form. This is erosion”

(269). Problems arose when the food chain reflected in the biota was

interrupted by economic activity. Then a stable short-term competitive

equilibrium in the economy might persist beside an unsustainable biological

disequilibrium. He gave the example of ranching in the southwest. A degree

of land-use had been established there early in the twentieth century that was

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in economic equilibrium, at least in the short run. Ranchers made money up

to a marginal limit by intense cultivation of the land. But “over-grazing” in

this economic equilibrium brought the biota into serious disequilibrium.

“This region, when grazed by livestock, reverted through a series of more

and more worthless grasses, shrubs, and weeds to a condition of unstable

equilibrium. Each recession of plant types bred erosion; each increment to

erosion bred a further recession of plants. The result today is a progressive

and mutual deterioration, not only of plants and soils, but of the animal

community subsisting thereon” (Leopold 1968, 206). Biological

disequilibrium had destabilized the short-run economic equilibrium and in

the long run forced settlement into reverse.

Loss of Faith in Economics

Leopold’s disillusionment with conventional economic analysis grew not

from discovery of inconsistencies in the theory or from the attraction of

alternative doctrine but from discovery of what might be called market

failures in areas that meant a great deal to him. These failures were

especially critical because they were accentuated in conditions of rapid

economic development and because they remained little recognized for what

they were: “the power to injure land-health grew faster than the

consciousness that it can be injured” (Leopold 1991 [1944], 311)

The first market failure was reflected in soil erosion and the irreversible loss

of arable land in the wake of helter-skelter expansion across the frontier. He

reported in 1923: “Erosion eats into our hills like a contagion, and floods

bring down the loosened soil upon our valleys like a scourge. Water, soil,

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animals, and plants – the very fabric of prosperity – react to destroy each

other and us” (Leopold 1991 [1923], 93). At this date he was uncertain of

the cause of the erosion, but he was certain action must be taken

immediately. “Science can and must unravel those reactions, and

government must enforce the findings of science. This is the economic

bearing of conservation on the future of the southwest” (93). He thought the

destruction of land a tragic loss for all living things that society had not

taken sufficiently seriously. Initially Leopold’s distress over soil erosion was

conventionally utilitarian; we were destroying a capital asset that would be

needed in the future. Our time preference was undesirably short run and our

discount rate for future production too high. But over time his unease

became more complex. He denied that members of one generation had the

right to squander the patrimony of its successors, even if their values

reflected in the market impelled them to do so. He regretted that economists

had dominated the conversation so much, which led to the neglect of land in

the early stages of development when it was abundant and expected market

returns were low. “Thus far we have considered the problem of conservation

of land purely as an economic issue. A false front of exclusively economic

determinism is so habitual to Americans in discussing public questions that

one must speak in the language of compound interest to get a hearing. In my

opinion, however, one can not round out a real understanding of the situation

in the southwest without likewise considering its moral aspects” (Leopold

1991 [1923], 94 and Meine 1988, 188).

By this reference to “morality” Leopold meant social responsibility to

preserve the fertility of land even if it was not most profitable to do so in the

short run. At this early stage in his thinking Leopold was already coming to

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the conclusion that there needed to be an infusion of morality into

economics beyond simply the Benthamite moral injunctions to pursue self

interest. He may have taken this idea from Hadley, who had made the point

repeatedly in his textbook (e.g. Hadley 1897 [1896], 23). In 1924 Leopold

described the problem of soil erosion as calling into question how effectively

the United States was responding to its vanishing frontier. “To a degree we

are facing the question of whether we are here to ‘skin’ the Southwest and

then get out, or whether we are here to found a permanent civilized

community with room to grow and improve. We cannot long continue to

accept our losses without admitting that the former, rather than the latter, is

by way of becoming the real result of our occupancy” (Leopold 1991 [1924],

110). Leopold was always ready to inject into a discussion insights from

other disciplines, in this case formal ethics, a source he appreciated was not

likely to find favor with economists or business persons because it called

into question the Benthamite premises. He wrote: “Philosophy, then

suggests one reason why we can not destroy the earth with moral impunity;

namely, that the dead earth is an organism possessing a certain kind and

degree of life, which we intuitively respect as such. Possibly, to most men of

affairs, this reason is too intangible to either accept or reject as a guide to

human conduct. But philosophy also offers another and more easily

debatable question: was the earth made for man’s use, or has man merely the

privilege of temporarily possessing an earth made for other and inscrutable

purposes? The question of what he can properly do with it must necessarily

be affected by this question” (Leopold 1991 [1923], 95).

Perhaps, Leopold speculated, the destruction of the land resulted from

arrogance, myopia, and too much of the “booster spirit,” by which he meant

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a sort of pathological exaggeration of the Benthamite self-interest postulate.

He continued to detect in the behavior of many settlers what he considered

to be a mistaken time-preference, directed toward the short run. This was

much admired in American myth but had been warned against by his Yale-

trained mentors Hadley and Pinchot. “Granted that the earth is for man –

there is still a question: what man? Did not the cave dwellers who tilled and

irrigated these our valleys think that they were the pinnacle of creation – that

these valleys were made for them? Undoubtedly, and then the Pueblos? Yes.

And then the Spaniards? Not only thought so, but said so. And now we

Americans? Ours beyond a doubt! (How happy a definition is that one of

Hadley’s which states, ‘Truth is that which prevails in the long run’!)”

(Leopold 1991 [1923], 96). Increasingly, Leopold concluded, destruction of

arable land arose from the impatience of settlers to exploit their property in

the present at the expense of the future. The result was a market failure that

grew out of these socially irresponsible responses of individuals, potential

behavior that seemed not to have been taken into account by Bentham or his

disciples: “just why do we wish to grow by unearned increment instead of an

earned increment derived from our basic resources? Does it ever occur to the

booster that we have fifty million acres of range in this state [New Mexico]

injured or ruined by overgrazing that could be made into a source of wealth

and prosperity….That the lack of public interest in these real resources is

causing them to deteriorate instead of develop?” (Leopold 1991[1923],100).

The second set of observations by Leopold that contributed to his

disillusionment with unconstrained economic development, and the

economic principles that justified it, concerned the destruction of wildlife

and in some cases even the extinction of species. His personal and

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professional lives were closely involved with what would be known later as

the tragedy of the commons. Any resource that did not entail property rights

for someone was likely to be obliterated. He wrote as early as 1918: “It

seems safe to call a fallacy the idea that civilization excludes wild life. It is

time for the American public to realize this. Progress is no longer an excuse

for the destruction of our native animals and birds, but on the contrary

implies not only an obligation, but an opportunity for their perpetuation”

(Leopold 1991 [1918], 52). Leopold was not, of course, the first of his

generation to worry about wildlife destruction; he was influenced especially

by the writings of William Temple Hornaday. But he gave the problem his

distinctive analysis.

Leopold seems to have recognized clearly that the problem of environmental

protection grew out of what we would now describe as an n person

prisoners’ dilemma game. In principle cooperation among the players could

be achieved by government and this should lead to the best social outcome –

environmental protection. This was Leopold’s expectation for the

Progressive programs of Teddy Roosevelt. But for some reason the good

results seldom happened. He did not, like present-day public choice

economists, examine theoretically the reasons for this failure – short time

horizons of legislators, voter apathy, misaligned incentives of public

servants etc. But as a frustrated public servant he could see the evidence of

failure on the ground and he was led to seek alternative strategies.

Leopold was unwilling to countenance a system of protection that turned

ownership of wildlife over to the rich and powerful, as was the practice in

Europe. Even though it might solve the immediate economic problem of

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species survival, it was politically unacceptable. “A wide-open market,

almost universal game farming, commercialized shooting privileges, and

some incidental overflow shooting for the poor man – is this not the sum and

substance of the European system? It is. And the European system of game

management is undemocratic, unsocial, and therefore dangerous. I assume

that it is not necessary to argue that the development of any undemocratic

system is to be avoided at all costs” (Leopold 1991[1919], 66). Some other

way would have to be found. Leopold thus identified a third arena, in

addition to the economic and the biotic, in which, when forming policy,

mutually consistent equilibria had to be discovered – the political.

Leopold mourned especially the passing of the passenger pigeon, and threats

to survival of the prairie chicken, the timber wolf and the grizzly bear. Most

ad hoc proposals for their protection he found unsatisfactory. “Relegating

grizzlies to Alaska,” he said, “is about like relegating happiness to heaven;

one may never get there” (Leopold 1968, 199). Leopold stated emphatically

that for him species loss was an unacceptable cost of unconstrained

economic growth. Some of his most moving essays concern the slaughter of

endangered creatures. He said in 1947 at the dedication of a monument to

the last carrier pigeon, attended by less that thirty people, “Our grandfathers

were less well-housed, well-fed, well-clothed than we are. The strivings by

which they bettered their lot are also those which deprived us of our pigeons.

Perhaps we grieve because we are not sure, in our hearts that we have gained

by the exchange. The gadgets of industry bring us more comforts than the

pigeons did, but do they add as much to the glory of spring?” (Leopold

1968, 109). The case of the pigeon, Leopold believed, should be a wake-up

call for what lay in the future for other species: “we face a dwindling supply

20

and a growing demand for game. What are we going to do about it?”

(Leopold 1991 [1919], 62).

Leopold observed that under a Benthamite regime all wildlife was likely to

be placed in one of three categories: (1)“game” that should be protected for

the future because it yielded human utility after “harvesting” (ducks, deer

etc), (2) other animals that were of no obvious human benefit or detriment

and that could safely be ignored and neglected (songbirds, many amphibians

etc), and (3) what were called “predators,” “varmints,” or “vermin” that

competed with humans for food and, therefore, should be eliminated

(wolves, bears, otters, hawks, owls etc.). Practices that followed from this

categorization, he conceded, might maximize human utility in the short run,

but in the long run would be esthetically damaging and could bring disaster

by destabilizing biological equilibria. Even with the first category, game,

there were unique problems involving joint production, externalities,

delayed adjustment, and other issues.

In the case of ordinary economic products, the free play of economic forces automatically adjusts supply to demand. Game production, however, is not so simple. Irreplaceable species may be destroyed before these forces become operative. Moreover, game is not a primary crop, but a secondary by-product of farm and forest lands, obtainable only when the farming and forestry cropping methods are suitably modified in favor of the game. Economic forces act through these primary land uses, rather than directly (Leopold 1991 [1930], 150). The Benthamite tendency to categorize everything in nature according to

usefulness or uselessness to humans affected botanical species as well as

21

animals: “foresters have excommunicated the tamarack because he grows

too slowly to pay compound interest” (Leopold 1968, 71).

A lifelong concern of Leopold was with the deer population of North

America. A result of the reduction, or extinction, of the natural predators of

deer had been an explosion in their numbers, leading to damage to forests

and the habitat of other wild things, including many plants and trees.

A third consequence of unrestrained economic growth that Leopold was

convinced was the result, in part at least, of utilitarian thinking was the loss

of true wilderness. “Wilderness is the raw material out of which man has

hammered the artifact called civilization” (Leopold 1968, 188). But “the

major premise of civilization is that the attainments of one generation shall

be available to the next” (Leopold 1991 [1933], 173). Benthamite doctrine

dictated, it seemed to him, that if any valuable natural resource remained

unused, progress consisted in using it, and this included making the wild

places tame. This practice, he was absolutely certain, led to a serious market

failure. He had real difficulty explaining just why this was so, using

terminology that an economist would find credible, but he tried. He

explained: “Civilization is not, as they often assume, the enslavement of a

stable and constant earth. It is a state of mutual and interdependent

cooperation between human animals, other animals, plants, and soils, which

may be disrupted at any moment by the failure of any of them” (Leopold

1991 [1933], 183]. He admitted that pushing back the frontier had long been

a central tenet of the American ethos; still he believed that the challenge

now, as the frontier was closing, was to modify this view and to preserve

before they were all gone some of the wild places that had for long been in

abundance. In an article in the Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics

22

he addressed economists directly on this point. “From the earliest times one

of the principal criteria of civilization has been the ability to conquer the

wilderness and convert it to economic use. To deny the validity of this

criterion would be to deny history. But because the conquest of wilderness

has produced beneficial reactions on social, political, and economic

development, we have set up more or less unconsciously, the converse

assumption that the ultimate social, political, and economic development

will be produced by conquering the wilderness entirely – that is by

eliminating it from our environment” (Leopold 1991 [1925], 134). Not so!

He believed fervently. For Leopold, experience in the wild was esthetically

thrilling, almost spiritual, and he returned there often for enrichment. But

how could he persuade others of the value of this experience? “Man always

kills the thing he loves, and so we the pioneers have killed our wilderness.

Some say we had to. Be that as it may, I am glad I shall never be young

without wild country to be young in. Of what avail are forty freedoms

without a blank spot on the map?” (Leopold 1968, 148-9).

Leopold was convinced that wilderness could have the same vital impact on

others as on him, even though most could not anticipate this since they had

not experienced it. He attempted from time to time to defend wilderness with

more conventional arguments, such as that it could provide a scientific

baseline for changes in nature, and that it was a refuge for creatures that

might otherwise disappear. “A science of land health needs, first of all, a

base datum of normality, a picture of how healthy land maintains itself as an

organism” (Leopold 1968, 196; and Meine 1988, 195). But the appeal of the

wild for him, a man with no conventional religion, remained essentially

mystical. A cynical economist might say that wilderness simply loomed

23

large in Leopold’s own utility function as a place to hunt and fish and he

wished others in society to pay for his self-indulgence. Here is what Leopold

said in anticipation of such a critique:

There is a basic difference between the adventures of the chase and the adventures of wilderness travel. Production of game for the chase can, with proper skill, be superimposed upon agriculture and forestry and can be indefinitely perpetuated. But the wilderness cannot be superimposed on anything. The wilderness and economics are, in every ordinary sense, mutually exclusive. If the wilderness is to be perpetuated at all, it must be in areas exclusively dedicated to that purpose. We come now to the question: Is it possible to preserve the element of Unknown Places in our national life? Is it practicable to do so, without undue loss in economic values? I say ‘yes’ to both questions. But we must act vigorously and quickly, before the remaining bits of wilderness have disappeared. Like parks and playgrounds and other ‘useless’ things, any system of wilderness areas would have to be owned and held for public use by the Government. The fortunate thing is that the Government already owns enough of them, scattered here and there in the poorer and rougher parts of the National Forests and National Parks, to make a very good start. The one thing needful is for the Government to draw a line around each one and say: ‘This is wilderness, and wilderness it shall remain.’ A place where Americans may ‘venture forth, as becometh men, into remote lands.’ Such a policy would not subtract even a fraction of one per cent from our national wealth, but would preserve a fraction of what has, since first the flight of years began, been wealth to the human spirit (Leopold 1991[1924], 125). When discussing matters like the preservation of wild places Leopold was

always looking over his shoulder at “the economists,” thinking that they

were the ones most likely to find fault with his proposals. He recognized full

well that the opportunity cost of putting an “off limits: wilderness” sign in

front of a parcel of natural resources would open him up not only to the

charge of preferential treatment for elite tastes but also of impeding the

24

growth in output of conventional consumer goods and services. The issue, he

claimed, had not yet come to prominence in America only because of the

abundance of wilderness just across the frontier. “The accessible supply has

heretofore been unlimited, like the supply of air-power, or tide-power, or

sunsets, and we do not recognize anything as a resource until the demand

becomes commensurable with the supply.” But, as Frederick Jackson Turner

had demonstrated, “Now, after three centuries of overabundance, and before

we have even realized that we are dealing with a non-reproducible resource,

we have come to the end of our pioneer environment and are about to push

its remnants into the Pacific” (Leopold 1991 [1925], 137). He may have

been reflecting on John Stuart Mill’s discussion of the stationary state when

he examined the implications of slower growth.

There is a current advertisement of [H.G.] Wells’ Outline of History which says “The unforgivable sin is standing still. In all Nature, to cease to grow is to perish.” I suppose this pretty accurately summarizes the rebuttal which the Economic American would make to the proposal of a national system of wilderness playgrounds. But what is standing still? And what constitutes growth? The Economic American has shown very plainly that he thinks growth is the number of ciphers added yearly to the national population and the national bank-roll. But the Gigantosaurus tried out that definition of growth for several million years. He was a quantitative economist of the first water. He added two ciphers to his stature, and a staggering row of them to his numbers. But he perished, the blind victim of natural and “economic” laws. They made him and they destroyed him (Leopold 1991 [1924], 125). The greatest threat to the survival of true wilderness areas, Leopold

concluded, was not the commitment of the economist to private over public

consumption, but rather the automobile and the special interests behind the

infrastructure that sustained it. “The thing that is choking out the wilderness

is not true economics at all, but rather that Frankenstein which our boosters

25

have builded [sic], the ‘Good Roads Movement’” (Leopold 1991[1924],

126). One way that was often proposed to save the wilderness, Leopold

observed, was to declare “wild” any thing that currently had no market

value. But, at best, this was a short-term solution. Before long “it will be

physically impossible to find any area which does not embrace some

economic values. Sooner or later some private interest will wish to develop

these values, at which time those who are thinking in terms of the national

development in the broad sense and those who are thinking of local

development in the narrow sense will come to grips. And forthwith the

private interests will invoke the aid of the steam roller. They always do. And

unless the wilderness idea represents the mandate of an organized, fighting

and voting body of far-seeing Americans, the steam roller will win”

(Leopold 1991 [1925], 132). In stressing the inherent advantage of strong

organized private interests over weak public ones in influencing the

formation of public policy, Leopold was anticipating by three decades one of

the main themes in John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society (1958).

What did Leopold find wrong with economics as an answer to these

problems?

Leopold never asked what was wrong with economics quite so baldly. But

the question lurked behind many of his essays. His own strong preferences

were for protection of land fertility, wildlife, and wild places, because from

observation he concluded that these all were losing the battle for survival in

the market economy. Something needed to be done, and economics stood in

the way. “The conservation movement is, at the very least, an assertion that

26

these interactions between man and land are too important to be left to

chance, even that sacred variety of chance known as economic law”

(Leopold 1991 [1933], 185). Leopold liked to use biological metaphors to

illuminate economic issues, and vice versa. In discussing unconstrained

economic growth he was fond of John Burroughs’ account of the Irish potato

bug that ultimately committed suicide by consuming a its essential

environment (Meine 1988, 215). Were humans, he asked, simply potato

bugs writ large?

If the market did not effectively protect the environmental values he held

dear, this suggested to Leopold that there must be flaws in the theory that

underlay the market. To determine what these flaws might be he returned

often to the original Benthamite principles. Increasingly Leopold questioned

the Benthamite portrayal of the narrowly self-interested maximizing

individual as the actual and desirable unit of the economy and society across

time and place. There are indications of the influence of Thorstein Veblen’s

ideas in his reflections on this question (e.g. Veblen 1931 [1899], chap. 10).

For example, rather like Veblen Leopold justified sport and hunting and

fishing in a wilderness environment on the ground that they had their roots

in the combative instincts of primitive humans and had evolved into these

comparatively harmless manifestations of formerly destructive tendencies.

Leopold wrote:

Physical combat between men, for instance, for unnumbered centuries was an economic fact. When it disappeared as such, a sound instinct led us to preserve it in the form of athletic sports and games. Physical combat between men and beasts since first the flight of years began was an economic fact, but when it disappeared as such, the instinct of the race led us to hunt and fish for sport. The transition of these tests of skill from an economic to a social basis has in no way destroyed the efficacy as human

27

experiences – in fact, the change may be regarded in some respects as an improvement (Leopold 1991[1925], 137). Leopold was not afraid to reject openly the Benthamite behavioral postulate

of narrow utility maximization, as applied to nature at least. He considered it

a fallacy, “clearly borrowed from modern science, that the human relation to

land is only economic. It is, or should be esthetic as well. In this respect our

present culture, and especially our science, is false, ignoble, and self-

destructive” (Leopold 1991 [1947], 337). Leopold’s anti-Benthamite

position grew out of his training in evolutionary biology and was seldom

challenged because he operated well outside the economics discipline. Few

economists knew that he was questioning their hard-core propositions or

could do much about it if they did. On occasion Leopold attacked

economists directly on their use of the rational actor hypothesis in their

models. For example, he complained in A Sand County Almanac that

acceptance of the Benthamite propositions caused some behavior to be taken

as inevitable that should still be the subject of doubtful inquiry: “some

economists see the whole of society as a plaything for processes, our

knowledge of which is largely ex post facto. It is reasonable to suppose that

our social processes have a higher volitional content than those of the rabbit,

but it is also reasonable to suppose that we, as a species, contain population

behavior patterns of which nothing is known because circumstances have

never evoked them. We may have others the meaning of which we have

misread” (Leopold 1968, 186).

Like Sumner and Hadley Leopold saw human behavior as evolutionary, with

natural selection operating among alternative behaviors as among species.

Indeed failure to adapt behavior to changing circumstances threatened

28

survival for those that made the wrong choices. He pointed out that often

mankind had adapted successfully and modified behavior effectively

through its short history. For example, a natural result of difference of

opinion among individuals could be destructive conflict; but humans had

learned to restrain themselves, avoid conflict, and insist upon restraint

among others. An example of how human interpersonal behavior had

changed within the family that Leopold delighted in retelling and retold

again recently by Margaret Attwood in a play entitled Penelopiad,)

concerned Odysseus returning from Troy to discover that a dozen of his

slave girls had been misbehaving in his absence. As punishment, and as a

message to others, he hanged them all on one rope - and no one seemed

particularly affronted. It was his business alone. “The hanging involved no

question of propriety. The girls were property” (Leopold 1968, 201). But

since then much had changed. Such treatment of women was no longer

practiced or even contemplated. Women were no longer regarded as

property, and such actions as that of Odysseus were now deemed intolerable.

Human behavior was modified through experience and some sort of social

selection by which society’s evolutionary prospects were increased. Similar

progress to that accomplished in interpersonal relations could, presumably,

be achieved also in relations with nature. This notion, like others, may have

come to Leopold directly from Hadley who wrote: “In some respects the

application of the doctrine of natural selection to human history is easier and

clearer than its application to biology” (Hadley 1897 [1896], 19). An

evolution in human attitudes toward the environment similar to that toward

human relations must occur, Leopold insisted, if disaster were to be avoided.

The biggest danger ahead lay in the shortening of time available for

adjustment. Technology had provided humans with tools that permitted them

29

to affect, and destroy, parts of their environment with blinding speed. If they

could not find the means to adapt their behavior to this new power they

might follow the Irish potato bug into oblivion.

In these reflections it might seem that Leopold was influenced by the

Scottish moralists of the eighteenth century, and especially by Adam Smith

in his discussion of “moral sentiments.” Leopold devoted an essay to what

he called “The Ecological Conscience” in which he called for the

development of attitudes toward nature very similar to the human

sympathies that Smith saw as necessary background to successful market

interactions (Leopold 1991 [1947], 338-46). But there is no direct evidence

of this connection and it is more likely that the inspiration came from

Darwin, Huxley, and the other evolutionists with whom Leopold was very

familiar. Hadley too had pointed toward evolutionary ethics. He wrote: “We

have a natural selection of ethical types rather than physical ones” (Hadley

1897 [1896], 22). In the following passage Leopold discussed the

development of social ethics as an evolutionary movement away from

unconstrained market competition toward some kind of cooperation that

might prevent the extinction of the human species. The cooperative solution

of the n person prisoners’ dilemma game would come through an evolution

in human behavior rather that through governmental intervention.

This extension of ethics, so far studied only by philosophers, is actually a process in ecological evolution. Its sequences may be described in ecological as well as in philosophical terms. An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct. These are two definitions of one thing. The thing has its origin in the tendency of interdependent individuals or groups to evolve modes of co-operation. The ecologist calls

30

these symbioses. Politics and economics are advanced symbioses in which the original free-for-all competition has been replaced, in part, by co-operative mechanisms with an ethical content (Leopold 1968, 202). Leopold suggested that one of the reasons for over-emphasis in public policy

on short-run goals was the short-run bias in contemporary human thinking.

If the short-run choice set were treated as immutable and inevitable, as it

seemed to be in Benthamite analysis, destructive policies and practices were

unlikely ever to be changed, including those that allowed land to be

irreparably damaged and species driven to extinction for short-term gain.

Without behavioral change the human species too might be on the road to

extinction. He thought that Sinclair Lewis had recognized the problem of

human misbehavior clearly in his novel Babbitt, and Leopold often referred

to self-destructive selfishness in short-hand as “Babbitry” ( E.g. Leopold

1968, 10). As World War II ended Leopold feared that the short-run focus

on improving creature comforts immediately could lead to ecological

disaster, and the last thing society, or economics, should do was consider

this orientation as immutable: “our bigger-and-better society is now like a

hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the

capacity to remain healthy. The whole world is so greedy for more bathtubs

that it has lost the stability necessary to build them, or even to turn off the

tap. Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy

contempt for a plethora of material blessings” (Leopold 1968, ix).

The second Benthamite injunction that Leopold examined and rejected was

to avoid the concept of “community” when forming public policy and think

instead of society as made up exclusively of optimizing individuals who

31

were the means and ends of human accomplishment. Without some sense of

community, he felt certain, the environment was doomed. “Community

welfare, a sense of unity in the land, and a sense of personal pride in such

unity, must in some degree move the private owner, as well as the public”

(Leopold 1991 [1944], 317). Indeed he thought that the destruction of the

natural environment resulted often from too much resort to individualism in

the competitive market, and neglect of the cooperation required in a

collective. Nature should be pictured as part of the community of which man

too was merely a part. “Conservation is getting nowhere because it is

incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because

we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a

community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and

respect. There is no other way for land to survive the impact of mechanized

man, nor for us to reap from it the esthetic harvest it is capable, under

science, of contributing to culture” (Leopold 1968, viii). A sense of the need

for self-sacrifice that was characteristic of a community was essential

because some conservation practices were not profitable for the practitioner,

at least in the short run. “Some components of land can be conserved

profitably, but others not. All are profitable to the community in the long

run. Unified conservation must therefore be activated primarily as an

obligation to the community, rather than as an opportunity for profit”

(Leopold 1991 [1944], 319). Such self-sacrifice was well accepted in the

family and other parts of society and there was no reason why it could not be

extended to the physical environment. A desired behavioral characteristic

that Leopold called adherence to a “land ethic” implied acceptance of a

concept of community that went beyond conventional economic or political

relationships. Humans must accept that their survival required them to

32

acknowledge membership in a community containing everything in nature.

“In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of

the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for

his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such” (Leopold

1968, 204).

Finally, Leopold rejected the third Benthamite principle that all human tastes

and desires should be considered of equal merit and not open to evaluation

or modification through public policy. He observed that tastes had in fact

changed substantially over time and would continue to evolve. The changes

had not been random and had been affected already by public policy. It was

necessary now to think hard about the course of this history. The survival of

birds and animals had depended on what human wants were at any moment.

If creatures yielded utility they were “managed,” with the expectation that

they should survive; if there was no utility in prospect, extinction was the

prospect. This was likely the fate of “those species of wilderness game

which do not adapt themselves to economic land-use, or of migratory birds

which are owned in common, or of non-game forms classed as predators, or

of rare plant associations which must compete with economic plants and

livestock, or in general of all native forms which fly at large or have only an

esthetic or scientific value to man….They need ‘management’ – the

perpetuation of good habitat – just as game does, but the ordinary motives

for providing it are lacking. They are the threatened element in outdoor

America – the crux of conservation policy” (Leopold 1991 [1936], 231).

There was no reason to presume that human tastes could not, or should not,

be given a gentle nudge from time to time, Leopold suggested, if the

consequential changes in human consumption were socially desirable and

33

led to preservation of a healthy biota. “What we call economic laws are

merely the impact of our changing wants on the land which supplies them.

When that impact becomes destructive of our own tenure on the land, as is

so conspicuously the case today, then the thing to examine is the validity of

the wants themselves” (Leopold 1991 [1942], 303).

Related to Leopold’s suggestion that individual wants could be manipulated

somewhat for the benefit of society was his suggestion that economic

development overall could be slowed down if necessary to achieve a better

quality of life. The machine age had yielded such a cornucopia of machine

made articles that little thought had been given to the full consequence of

this abundance for society.

As nearly as I can see, all the new isms – Socialism, Communism, Fascism, and especially the late but not lamented Technocracy – outdo even capitalism itself in their preoccupation with one thing: The distribution of more machine-made commodities to more people. They all proceed on the theory that if we can all keep warm and full, and all own a Ford and a radio, the good life will follow. Their programs differ only in ways to mobilize machines to this end. Though they despise each other, they are all, in respect of this objective, as identically alike as peas in a pod. They are competitive apostles of a single creed: salvation by machinery (Leopold 1991[1933], 188). “Damnation by machinery,” Leopold implied, was the real consequence of

this creed. Yet he remained optimistic overall. He never lost his faith in

democracy. True salvation would come sooner or later from what he called

“the essence of civilization,” and what Woodrow Wilson called “The decent

opinion of mankind” (Leopold 1991 [1933], 189).

34

So what is to be done?

Leopold grew up in a family of successful entrepreneurs and he appreciated

both in theory and in practice the potential accomplishments of the

competitive market system. He had a brief flirtation with a strong role for

the state through the Progressive ideas of Teddy Roosevelt that led to the

creation of the United States Forest Service and the National Forest system.

But after working with the Forest Service he became disillusioned with

public bureaucracy, and he repeatedly declined invitations to join the

Washington head office. He was particularly angry about the power of

special interests in the formation of public policy and the way in which

elected officials took advantage of public ignorance. There were so many

casualties of insensitive acronymic federal environmental programs that he

was hesitant to suggest any more. Wetlands were a good example. The

result, if not the intent, of public policy had been mainly to destroy them.

“To build a road is so much simpler than to think of what the country really

needs. A roadless marsh is seemingly as worthless to the alphabetical

conservationist as an undrained one was to the empire builders. Solitude, the

one natural resource still undowered of alphabets, is so far recognized as

valuable only by ornithologists and cranes” (Leopold 1968, 101). The

Roosevelt New Deal was for Leopold the last straw. Grandiose, expensive,

and often well-intended programs tripped over each other and seldom

achieved their intended outcomes. Economists were deeply complicit in the

creation and implementation of these programs, especially when designed to

reduce activities that they disliked. “Every profession keeps a small herd of

epithets, and needs a pasture where they may run at large. Thus economists

must find free range somewhere for their pet aspersions, such as

submarginality, regression, and institutional rigidity” (Leopold 1968, 101-2).

35

He thought economists notoriously insensitive to esthetic values, and hence

their schemes necessarily unbalanced. He reflected on the beauty of his own

“sub-marginal” farm in a sand county of Wisconsin.

Sometimes in June, when I see unearned dividends of dew hung on every lupine, I have doubts about the real poverty of the sands. On solvent farmlands lupines do not even grow, much less collect a daily rainbow of jewels. If they did, the weed-control officer, who seldom sees a dewy dawn, would doubtless insist they be cut. Do economists know about lupines (Leopold 1968, 102)? In dealing with the mounting problems of the environment, Leopold

observed, the government had essentially three weapons at hand: legislation,

public ownership of natural resources, and manipulation of incentives

through taxation and subsidies. In the use of all three of these tools it had

proven itself substantially inept. In consequence, Leopold concluded, “The

real and indispensable functions of government in conservation,” should be

very limited, as follows. “Government is the tester of fact vs. fiction, the

umpire of bogus vs. genuine, the sponsor of research, the guardian of

technical standards, and, I hasten to add, the proper custodian of land which,

for one reason or another, is not suited to private husbandry. These functions

will become real and important as soon as conservation begins to grow from

the bottom up, instead of from the top down, as is now the case” (Leopold

1991 [1942], 300).

Leopold’s program of environmental policy had several parts. First,

education should create and strengthen in each citizen what he called the

“land ethic”. This was less a new way of calculating ethical values than a set

36

of automatic responses to environmental situations quite similar to the

sympathetic actions derived from moral sentiments that Adam Smith found

rooted in human “sympathies.” In the environmental case the sympathies

had to be toward all of nature rather than just other humans. “Land, like

Odysseus’ slave-girls, is still property. The land-relation is still strictly

economic, entailing privileges but not obligations” (Leopold 1968, 203).

That had to change! And it was not an impossible dream. “During the three

thousand years which have since elapsed [since Odysseus and the slave

girls] ethical criteria have been extended to many fields of conduct, with

corresponding shrinkages in those judged by expediency only” (Leopold

1968, 202). The extension must continue and ways found to sensitize

humans to act the right way with respect to nature. “The objective is to teach

the student to see the land, to understand what he sees, and enjoy what he

understands” (Leopold 1991 [1942], 302). From this understanding an ethic

should follow. “An ethic must be regarded as a mode of guidance for

meeting ecological situations so new or intricate, or involving such deferred

reactions, that the path of social expediency is not discernible to the average

individual. Animal instincts are modes of guidance for the individual in

meeting such situations. Ethics are possibly a kind of community instinct in-

the-making” (Leopold 1968, 203). He insisted that “It is hard to make a man,

by pressure of law or money, do a thing which does not spring naturally

from his own personal sense of right and wrong” (Leopold 1991 [1937],

243-4). Leopold saw behavioral reform in the private sector as the essential

alternative to grandiose programs in the public sector. “At what point will

governmental conservation, like the mastodon, become handicapped by its

own dimensions? The answer, if there is any, seems to be in a land ethic, or

37

some other force which assigns more obligation to the private landowner”

(Leopold 1968, 213). To sum up, Leopold wrote:

A system of conservation based solely on economic self-interest is hopelessly lopsided. It tends to ignore, and thus eventually to eliminate, many elements in the land community that lack commercial value, but that are (as far as we know) essential to its healthy functioning. It assumes, falsely, I think, that the economic parts of the biotic clock will function without the uneconomic parts. It tends to relegate to government many functions eventually too large, too complex, or too widely dispersed to be performed by government. An ethical obligation on the part of the private owner is the only visible remedy for these situations (Leopold 1968, 214).

One of the major challenges was how to open up human eyes to the wonders

of nature in the midst of the machine age, and the dawning of the electronic

age. How to make them appreciate the natural beauty that was before them

and, therefore, adopt a land ethic voluntarily? To make the point he

described a mating ritual of woodcock called “peenting,” or “the sky dance

of spring,” that he himself often sought out and found always thrilling and

entertaining. Yet this performance was lost on most of those who could most

easily enjoy it, the farmers. “The drama of the sky dance is enacted nightly

on hundreds of farms, the owners of which sigh for entertainment, but

harbor the illusion that it is to be sought in theaters. They live on the land,

but not by the land” (Leopold 1968, 34). He was hopeful about the

possibilities for improved environmental understanding among farmers

through education and gentle persuasion. “Every farm woodland, in addition

to yielding lumber, fuel, and posts, should provide its owner a liberal

education. This crop of wisdom never fails, but it is not always harvested”

(Leopold 1968, 73). A residual concern for Leopold was that with greater

38

wealth farmers might lose rather than gain environmental sensitivity. He told

the story of one pioneer. “The old man was dead now; in his later years his

heart had thrilled only to his bank account and to the tally of his flocks and

herds, but the aspen [he had planted] revealed that in his youth he too had

felt the glory of the mountain spring” (Leopold 1968, 127).

The solution of environmental problems, Leopold was convinced, lay at the

grass roots and not in Madison or in Washington. The ecological conscience

had to be strengthened among those actually living on the land or interacting

with it. But neither the individual acting alone nor the government could do

the job. “This land is too complex for the simple processes of ‘the mass

mind’ armed with modern tools. To live in real harmony with such a country

seems to require either a degree of public regulation we will not tolerate, or a

degree of private enlightenment we do not possess” (Leopold 1991 [1933],

179). Reform of ecological education in the broadest sense seemed to be the

answer, but in content as much as in quantity. He wanted it made clear that

higher education alone was not necessarily an answer. “Let no man jump to

the conclusion that Babbitt must take his Ph.D. in ecology before he can

‘see’ his country. On the contrary, the Ph.D. may become as callous as an

undertaker to the mysteries at which he officiates” (Leopold 1968, 174).

Above all, strengthening the esthetic sense of nature should be an essential

component of all education. He took part in numerous experiments in his

own community to sensitize farmers to the land around them and to teach

them respect for their environment. He was active also in national

organizations that undertook education on a larger scale, such as Ducks

Unlimited, the Sierra Club, and the Wildlife Society. The result was often

frustration when the organizations floundered or when those being educated

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reverted immediately to past practices when their “education” ended or the

leadership departed. But Leopold usually soldiered on undeterred:

The puzzling aspect of such situations is that the existence of obligations over and above self-interest is taken for granted in such rural community enterprises as the betterment of roads, schools, churches, and baseball teams. Their existence is not taken for granted, nor as yet seriously discussed, in bettering the behavior of the water that falls on the land, or in the preserving of the beauty or diversity of the farm landscape. Land-use ethics are still governed wholly by economic self-interest, just as social ethics were a century ago. (Leopold 1968, 209)

The long-run solution to the problem of wildlife survival, Leopold felt

confident, necessarily lay with those small scale entrepreneurs by whom

wild creatures must ultimately be perceived as both economically and

esthetically valuable. This change in attitude might be achieved in part

through reforms in the law that would give the farmer some sort of property

rights in wildlife and, thereby, change the incentive system. “Conservation

will ultimately boil down to rewarding the private landowner who conserves

the public interest” (Leopold 1991 [1934], 202). But overall, “building

receptivity into the still unlovely human mind,” and stimulating constructive

day-to-day responses to environmental situations, remained the key

(Leopold 1968, 177). “Some, but not too much, management is good

aesthetics, but what may interest some readers more is that it appears to be

also good business” (Leopold 1991 [1931], 159). Yet what exactly this

implied for policy Leopold was not prepared to prescribe. He regretted that

until the land ethic was firmly in place the only way to be confident that

conservation of some natural resources would be taken seriously was to

demonstrate that economic ends would be achieved.

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One basic weakness in a conservation system based wholly on economic motives is that most members of the land community have no economic value. Wildflowers and songbirds are examples. Of the 22,000 higher plants and animals native to Wisconsin, it is doubtful whether more than 5 per cent can be sold, fed, eaten, or otherwise put to economic use. Yet these creatures are members of the biotic community, and if (as I believe) its stability depends on its integrity, they are entitled to continuance. When one of these non-economic categories is threatened, and if we happen to love it, we invent subterfuges to give it economic importance. At the beginning of the century songbirds were supposed to be disappearing. Ornithologists jumped to the rescue with some distinctly shaky evidence to the effect that insects would eat us up if birds failed to control them. The evidence had to be economic in order to be valid (Leopold 1968, 210). Leopold was careful to note that the real work of conservation was far from

simple and was just starting. Conservationists “are just beginning to realize

that their task involves the reorganization of society, rather than the passage

of some fish and game laws” (Leopold 1991 [1934], 210).

Leopold made eloquent pleas for humility in formation of public policy with

respect to the environment. He urged that small-scale trials be undertaken

before long-term commitments were made. He had been associated himself

with too many failed policies during his career to believe that large scale

programs should be implemented on the basis of modeling alone. One of his

strongest convictions was that the world was so full of uncontrollable

variables that few outcomes of changes in the status quo could be predicted

with confidence.

Conclusion

What can we take away from this account of the intellectual struggles of

Aldo Leopold with the implications of Benthamite economic ideas for the

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environmental policy issues that concerned him deeply? Is this account part

of the history of economic thought? Perhaps not, as economic thought is

sometimes conceived. Jacob Viner’s famous definition of economics as

“what economists do” suggests that Leopold and his writings were well

beyond the pale of economics. He was not trained in the discipline to an

advanced level, nor was he part of any recognized community of

economists. He did not do what economists do, nor did they know what he

did. Leopold is seldom mentioned in the histories of either ecological or

environmental economics (e.g. Robert Costanza et al., 1997). There is not

even any evidence that Leopold, though lodged in a department of

agricultural economics, had close friends among economists.

But if we define economics as the study of certain timeless phenomena like

the production, distribution, and exchange of goods and services in a social

system, then Leopold comes back into relevance. One of the most

fascinating aspects of his thought is how micro-economics moved in his

hands, and might have moved for others in the same way if they too had

been freed from the constraining limits of Benthamite doctrine concerning

human behavior, the meaning of community and the inviolability of tastes. It

is well accepted in the history and philosophy of science that for progress to

be achieved in science certain core principles must be accepted without

question by the practitioners. That is not disputed here. At the same time,

Leopold’s writings provide hints of how economic science might have

moved differently if some core principles had been supplanted,

supplemented, or even more seriously challenged during the first half of the

twentieth century.

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Leopold’s writings demonstrate how one conscientious intellectual,trained

outside of and unconstrained by the conventional heuristics and boundaries

of professional economics, reacted to the application of Benthamite thinking

to his areas of policy concern. Leopold’s responses are of more than passing

interest historically since he and his disciples had a significant impact on

environmental policy in the United States in the twentieth century.

Moreover, his ideas seem remarkably enlightened and prescient today as the

world faces new environmental challenges, unknown in his own time, such

as global warming. It has always been a puzzle why in the 1980s and 1990s

the disciplines of economics and ecology remained in such severe tension,

especially in action organizations such as the United States Environmental

Protection Agency. Was it because each discipline did not understand the

other? This was claimed by both sides in conflicts over findings such as

those of the Club of Rome in its controversial report Limits to Growth. This

account of Leopold’s thought suggests that some ecologists may have

known more economics than the economists suspected, and the differences

may have been deep and embedded in conflicting core principles of the two

fields.

It is worth reflecting finally on the extent to which those changes that

Leopold called for as means of avoiding environmental catastrophe are

indeed visible in the twenty-first century. A change in human behavior and

growth of something like a land ethic seems the best way to explain the

widespread public sensitivity today to environmental issues. Responses to

environmental depredations at the local, national, and global levels are now

more likely to begin with popular outcries than with official action.

Moreover these outcries seem rooted in something like the sympathy for

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nature that Leopold demanded. Threats to the Alaskan wilderness from the

Valdez disaster and proposals to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Reserve

brought a great outpouring of condemnation in the lower forty-eight states

that cannot be explained easily as the result of Benthamite cost-benefit

calculations by those who complained. These critiques seem to reflect the

automatic reactions of the kind that Leopold hoped to see evolve in the

citizenry. Leopold’s faith in the power of civil society institutions seems also

to have been justified. Rather than governmental agencies and profit-making

firms in the public and private sectors, it has been the non-profit

organizations of the “third sector”, from Green Peace to Resources for the

Future, from the local land trust to The Nature Conservancy, that have led

efforts to protect the environment. Finally, attempts to change tastes have

figured prominently in environmental activism: the farmers’ market

movement, the “fair trade” imprimatur on consumer goods, the recent efforts

to persuade consumers to “buy local,” and the rejection of bottled water are

all examples. Leopold would certainly not be satisfied with the current

scene, but he might be pleased with its direction.

Aldo Leopold was the quintessential multi-disciplinary man, and the new

discipline he helped to create, ecology, was made up from the natural,

physical and social sciences. But he paid the price sometimes for this multi-

disciplinarity and for venturing fearlessly into foreign disciplinary parts. He

ruminated as follows towards the end of his life. “A professor may pluck the

strings of his own instrument, but never that of another, and if he listens for

music he must never admit it to his fellows or to his students. For all are

restrained by an ironbound taboo which decrees that the construction of

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instruments is the domain of science, while the detection of harmony is the

domain of poets” (Leopold 1968, 153). Leopold was both scientist and poet.

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