Thanks Chris.

Maria-Stella
> 9/14/99
> 
> Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic: Is it Only Half a Loaf Unless a Consumption Ethic
> Accompanies It?
> 
> Or
> 
> Is the Shift to "Ecological Sustainability" on U.S. Public Lands Merely a
> Sophisticated "NIMBYism" Masquerading as a "Paradigm Shift"?
> 
> 
> By Doug MacCleery, USDA/Forest Service
> 
> Washington, D.C.
> 
> Over the last two decades there has been a substantial shift in the
> management emphasis of public, particularly federal, lands in the U.S. That
> shift has been to a substantially increased emphasis on managing these lands
> for biodiversity protection and amenity values, with a corresponding
> reduction in commodity outputs. Over the last decade, timber harvest on
> National Forest lands has dropped by 70 percent, oil and gas leasing by
> about 40 percent, and livestock grazing by at least 10 percent.
> 
> Terms like "ecosystem management," an "ecological approach to management,"
> and, more recently, "ecological sustainability" have been used to describe
> this change in the management emphasis of public lands. Many have referred
> to it as a significant "paradigm shift." Just recently, a Committee of
> Scientists issued a report proposing that the National Forests be managed
> for "ecological sustainability," where primary management emphasis is to be
> placed on "what is left" out on the land, rather than "what is removed."
> Commodity outputs, if they are produced, would become a derivative or
> consequence of managing National forests for primarily a biodiversity
> protection objective. Significantly, some Committee members bottomed this
> recommendation in part on "ethical and moral" grounds.
> 
> Many have attributed the move to ecosystem management or ecological
> sustainability to a belated recognition and adoption of Aldo Leopold’s "land
> ethic" -- the idea that management of land has, or should have, an ethical
> content. This year, celebrations are planned commemorating the 50th
> anniversary of the publishing of Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, in which
> he spoke eloquently about the need for an ethical obligation toward land use
> and management. One sign that Leopold’s ideas have finally struck a chord
> with the larger society is that conservation issues are increasingly being
> taken up as causes of American churches.
> 
> While a mission shift on U.S. public lands is occurring in response to
> changing public preferences, that same public is making no corresponding
> shift in its commodity consumption habits. The "dirty little secret" about
> the shift to ecological sustainability on U.S. public lands is that, in the
> face of stable or increasing per capita consumption in the U.S., the effect
> has been to shift the burden and impacts of that consumption to ecosystems
> somewhere else. For example, to private lands in the U.S. or to lands of
> other countries.
> 
> Between 1987 and 1997, federal timber harvest dropped 70 percent, from about
> 13 to 4 billion board feet annually. (Note: this 9 billion board foot
> reduction is "log scale," which translates into about a 15 billion board
> foot reduction in lumber that could have been processed from it – or about
> one-third of U.S. annual softwood lumber production). A significant effect
> of this reduction, in the face of continuing high levels of per capita wood
> consumption, has been to transfer harvest to private forest ecosystems in
> the U.S. and to forest ecosystems in Canada. For example:
> 
>   a.. Since 1990, U.S. softwood lumber imports from Canada rose from 12 to
> 18 billion board feet, increasing from 27 to 36 percent of U.S. softwood
> lumber consumption. Much of the increase in Canadian lumber imports has come
> from the native old-growth boreal forests. In Quebec alone, the export of
> lumber to the U.S. has tripled since 1990. The increased harvesting of the
> boreal forests in Quebec has become a public issue there.
>   a.. Harvesting on private lands in the southern United States also
> increased after the reduction of federal timber in the West. Today, the
> harvest of softwood timber in the southeastern U.S. exceeds the rate of
> growth for the first time in at least 50 years. Increased harvesting of
> fiber by chip mills in the southeastern U.S. has become a public issue
> regionally.
> Today the U.S. public consumes more resources than at anytime in its history
> and also consumes more per capita than almost any other nation. Since the
> first Earth Day in 1970, the average family size in the United States has
> dropped by 16 percent, while the size of the average single family house
> being built has increased by 48 percent.
> 
> The U.S. conservation community and the media have given scant attention to
> the "ecological transfer effects" of the mission shift on U.S. public lands.
> Any ethical or moral foundation for ecological sustainability is weak indeed
> unless there is a corresponding focus on the consumption side of the natural
> resource equation. Without such a connection, ecological sustainability on
> public lands is subject to challenge as just a sophisticated form of
> NIMBYism ("not in my back yard"), rather than a true paradigm shift.
> 
> A cynic might assert that one of the reasons for the belated adoption of
> Aldo Leopold’s land ethic is that it has become relatively easy and painless
> for most of us to do so. When Leopold was a young man forming his ideas,
> more than 40 percent of the U.S. population lived on farms. An additional 20
> percent lived in rural areas and were closely associated with the management
> of land. Today less than two percent of us are farmers and most of us, even
> those living in rural areas, are disconnected from any direct role in the
> management of land. Adopting a land ethic is easy for most of us today
> because it imposes the primary burden to act on someone else.
> 
> While few of us are resource producers any more, we all remain resource
> consumers. This is one area we all can act upon that could have a positive
> effect on resource use, demand and management. Yet few of us connect our
> resource consumption to what must be done to the land to make it possible.
> At the same time many of us espouse the land ethic, our operating motto in
> the marketplace seems to be "shop ‘till you drop" or "whoever dies with the
> most toys wins."
> 
> The disjunct between people as consumers and the land is reflected in rising
> discord and alienation between producers and consumers. Loggers, ranchers,
> fishermen, miners, and other resource producers have all at times felt
> themselves subject to scorn and ridicule by the very society that benefits
> from the products they produce. What is absent from much environmental
> discourse in the U.S. today is a recognition that urbanized society is no
> less dependent upon the products of forest and field than were the
> subsistence farmers of America's past. This is clearly reflected in the
> language used in such discourse. Rural communities traditionally engaged in
> producing timber and other natural resources for urban consumers are
> commonly referred to as natural resource "dependent" communities. Seldom are
> the truly resource dependent communities like Boulder, Denver, Detroit, or
> Boston ever referred to as such.
> 
> One of the relatively little known aspects of Aldo Leopold’s career is the
> years he spent at the Forest Service’s Forest Products Lab at Madison,
> Wisconsin. While there, he spoke of the need for responsible consumption. In
> 1928 Leopold wrote:
> 
> The American public for many years has been abusing the wasteful lumberman.
> A public which lives in wooden houses should be careful about throwing
> stones at lumbermen, even wasteful ones, until it has learned how its own
> arbitrary demands as to kinds and qualities of lumber, help cause the waste
> which it decries….
> 
> The long and the short of the matter is that forest conservation depends in
> part on intelligent consumption, as well as intelligent production of
> lumber.
> 
> If management of land has an ethical content, why does not consumption have
> a corresponding one, as well? Is there a need for a "personal consumption
> ethic" to go along with Leopold’s land ethic? In his wonderful land ethic
> chapter in A Sand County Almanac, Leopold wrote that evidence that no land
> ethic existed at the time was that a "farmer who clears his woods off a 75
> percent slope, turns his cows into the clearing, and dumps its rainfall,
> rocks, and soil into the community creek, is still (if otherwise decent) a
> respected member of society."
> 
> To take off on that theme and make it more contemporary, the evidence that
> no personal consumption ethic exists today is that a "suburban dweller with
> a small family who lives in a 4000 square-foot home, owns three or four
> cars, commutes to work alone in a gas guzzling sport utility vehicle (even
> though public transportation is available), and otherwise leads a highly
> resource consumptive lifestyle is still (if otherwise decent) a respected
> member of society. Indeed, her/his social status in the community may even
> be enhanced by virtue of that consumption."
> 
> Ecosystem management or ecological sustainability on public lands will have
> weak or non-existent ethical credentials and certainly will never be a truly
> holistic approach to resource management until the consumption side of the
> equation becomes an integral part of the solution, rather than an
> afterthought, as it is today. Belated adoption of Leopold’s land ethic was
> relatively easy. The true test as to whether a paradigm shift has really
> occurred in the U.S. will be whether society begins to see personal
> consumption choices as having an ethical and environmental content as well –
> and then acts upon them as such.
> 
> Douglas W. MacCleery is Assistant Director of Forest Management for the U.S.
> Forest Service in Washington, D.C.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 



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