Witti-Buch2 2001.qxd - Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society

Environmental Holistic Ethics:
Leopold and Callicot
Leszek Pyra
The subject matter of this short analysis is the evaluation of some aspects of the holistic
ethics as worked out by Aldo Leopold and J.Baird Callicot. Their views seem sometimes
to be very controversial, especially at the very first glance, but they nevertheless appeal
to everybody who is ecologically sensitive.
Aldo Leopold, the American philosophising forester, is the author of A Sand County
Almanac, which by many environmentalists is considered to be the Bible of
environmental philosophy of different kinds /Potter, XIII; Passmore, 3/. According to
Leopold the circle of morality expands, as history of human culture shows, and must
eventually include some new entities. He enumerates such entities writing: "The land
ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants,
and animals, or collectively: the land."/239/
The different representatives of environmental philosophy, and especially those
representing its holistic trend, usually claim that such philosophy is based both upon the
theories of evolution and on ecological sciences. Evolutionary theories show that we,
humans, are to a great extent related to nonhuman beings, who are our companions in
"the 3.5 bilion-year odyssey of life on Earth" /Raup, Sepkowski/. Next the ecological
sciences prove that all beings are not separate and independent entities and constitute
certain communities, interconnected in different, sometimes very complicated ways.
Finally, on the basis of such views, there emerges a new vision of nature, nature
conceived as a certain whole - structered and evolving all the time - towards a rather
unknown aim, I think. Leopold, however, seems to be of a somewhat different opinion,
therefore he writes: "Science has given us many doubts, but it has given us at least one
certainty: the trend of evolution is to elaborate and diversify the biota"./253/
According to some theoreticians nature as a whole resembles a huge organism. Jim
Lovelock, for example, goes even so far as to suggest that the whole Earth is one such
organism /Lovelock, 1979/. The metaphor of organism makes it possible to speak about
health or illness of some greater wholes, e.g. ecosystems. In such context there appears
Leopold's well-known imperative, prescribing what is good and what is not in regard to
man's handling nature. Writes Leopold: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the
integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends
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