Perspectives in Biology and Medicine

ALDO LEOPOLD'S LAND ETHIC REVISITED: TWO KINDS OF BIOETHICS VAN RENSSELAER POTTER* Trained as a professional forester, Aldo Leopold became widely recognized first as a proponent of "game management" [1], and then, in ever-widening circles of influence, he became conservationist, ecologist, administrator, lecturer, writer, philosopher, poetic spirit, and fountainhead for a "third step in a sequence" of ethics, which he viewed as "an evolutionary possibility and an ecological necessity" [2, p. 239], He was born onJanuary 11, 1887, in Burlington, Iowa, where his father and grandfather were prominent citizens [3]. He did graduate work and obtained a master's degree in forestry at the Yale Forest School in June 1909. He entered the U.S. Forest Service at once and was sent to the new Southwestern District in Arizona and New Mexico. By 1912 Leopold was supervisor of the Carson National Forest in northern New Mexico, "a million acres supporting 200,000 sheep, 7,000 head ofcattle, 600 homesteads and a billion feet of lumber" [3, p. 9]. In April 1913, in a remote area, he was almost fatally exposed to wet and cold conditions and required 18 months for recuperation, during which time Flader notes that he may have read the 11-volume Riverside edition of Thoreau's works, which he had received as a wedding gift. In her work on the life and work of Leopold "and the evolution of an ecological attitude toward deer, wolves and forests" [3], Susan Flader traces the evolution and adaptation of Leopold from his experience in the Southwest to his final position at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. She notes that Leopold is acknowledged as the "father" of the profession of wildlife management in America and that his book Game Management [1] "is still regarded as a basic statement of the science, art, and profession of wildlife management" and "has been continuously in *McArdle Laboratory for Cancer Research, University of Wisconsin Medical School, Madison, Wisconsin 53706.© 1987 by The University of Chicago. AU rights reserved. 003 1 -5982/87/3002-052 1$0 1 .00 Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 30, 2 ¦ Winter 1987 \ 157 print since 1933" [3, pp. 22-23]. His witnessing ofoverpopulation in the case of deer may have triggered his mainly neglected views on overpopulation in the case of the human species. With the publication of his successful text Leopold could indulge in "a reorientation in his thinking from a historical and recreational to a predominantly ecological and ethicaljustification for wilderness" [3, p. 29]. In April 1935 Leopold acquired the worn-out abandoned farm on the Wisconsin River that was to become the setting for most of the nature sketches in A Sand County Almanac; here he wrote most of the essays that constitute The Land Ethic [2], which, according to Meine [4], was composed in four phases over a period of 14 years. This remarkable essay has become the subject of countless articles; indeed, Meine has noted that Leopold was cited in 27 of 96 articles in the first 18 issues ??Environmental Ethics, which was founded in 1979. To quote Flader: "On April 21, 1948 Aldo Leopold died of a heart attack while helping his neighbors fight a grass fire that threatened his sand-country farm. One week earlier, the book of essays for which he had been seeking a publisher since early 1941 was accepted by Oxford University Press" [3, p. 35]. His son Luna edited the manuscript and saw it through to publication in 1949. The enlarged edition [2], which includes eight essays from Round River, was published in 1966. Although Aldo Leopold had laid out a framework for an ecological and population-oriented bioethics of survival in his seminal 1949 essay The Land Ethic [2] and in earlier essays, and although in my articles in 1970 [5, 6] and in my 1971 book Bioethics, Bridge to the Future [7] I had continued Leopold's line of thought and had coined the word bioethics, there was an independent movement at Georgetown University that utilized the word bioethics and applied it exclusively to medical problems in a newly created Center for Bioethics that had no concern for "overpopulation." Its director, LeRoy Walters, stated...