Hi again everybody,

Yeah I know--it's August and I'm spending way too much time at the
computer.  So what else is new?  :-)

Ted wrote:
>Ethics always posits a value system, and to ecocentric ethicists the
>central value
>is Earth with its ecosystems and all their contents including people. All have
>intrinsic values but humans are not to be privileged over everything else.
>In other
>words, we don't have the God-given right to destroy ecosystems and their
>organic/inorganic contents. So the over-riding concern, the ethical
>imperative is
>"to preserve all the parts" in Leopold's words.

Let me float a couple of blasphemous anti-environmental reflections about
Leopold's words here.  I have long mused about this passage in Leopold,
which reads more fully as:

"To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent
tinkering.  .  .  .  [section break]  Have we learned this first principle
of conservation: to preserve all the parts of the land mechanism?"  (in
"The Round River," paragraphs 7 and 8).

(Actually, the entire quote reads even more fully and includes things like
"If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether
we understand it or not,"  etc. )

I have always had a bit of a problem here with Leopold's "intelligent
tinkering" analogy--which, I take it, has spawned a school of lesser
imitations, including Paul Ehrlich's clearly inferior airplane
"rivet-popping" analogy.  Now, and at the risk of sounding like a
completely heretical eco-philosopher, I want to ask the question:

Why is the first rule of intelligent tinkering to keep all the parts?

Before I get excommunicated from the church, let me explain.  My point is
more aimed at the *analogy* itself, that is, to the analogy of tinkering.
I am emphatically NOT saying that we should all go out and start shooting
the last passenger pigeon or the last member of whatever other endangered
species happens to reside in our neighborhoods.

It seems to me that if there's one thing that tinkerers know (and I include
in this general category, "intelligent" tinkerers), it's that many
mechanisms can be made to work and/or otherwise operate with the mechanical
equivalents of band-aids and spit.  (Or duct tape and crazy glue, if your
tastes in tinkering are more refined.)

Why is it that Leopold supposes that a tinkerer (an "intelligent" one,
nonetheless) would place paramount importance on having all the parts,
first and foremost, as the "first principle" of tinkering?  Seems to me
that an intelligent tinkerer will know how to make things get up and go
even when parts are missing--he or she may in fact take a kind of perverse
pride in his/her ability to make things go that were previously just
botched pieces of junk.  So I'm not sure why Leopold emphasizes tinkering
here in this passage.  Surely in an ideal world, we'd have *all* the right
parts, and every company would be like the Ford Motor Company, which
apparently maintains a store of every part ever made by that company,
dating back even to those in the original Model A (or whatever the first
car it was that Henry Ford built).  But it seems to me that ecological and
political reality is NOT the ideal world of the Ford Motor Company (I can
almost hear the collective and audible sigh of relief now . . . . <g>.)  In
reality, intelligent tinkerers have to "make do" with a lot of substandard
and less-than-ideal conditions .  .  .  including parts
that-are-no-longer-made and never-really-worked-well-to-begin-with. . . .

And as anyone who has ever tinkered with cars will tell you, factory
original shiny chrome bumpers aren't needed to make a car run well.

This may seem like a roundabout way of commenting on Leopold, but it seems
to me that some environmentalists continue to get a lot of mileage out of
Leopold's "preserve all the parts" trope.  The mechanism metaphor he
employs in this passage is *exactly* the type of outdated and obsolete
mechanistic model of nature that ecological science has discarded.  How do
we know that nature ("the land" in Leopold-speak) is like a mechanism,
anyway?  After all, if nature and/or the land is really rather more
analogous to an organism, say, or to a *body*, than to a machine, then,
well--there are an awful lot of body parts that we can do without and still
make do.  Lop off an arm, and guess what: you're still alive.  (Kids, don't
try this at home.)  :-)  Of course, my point is emphatically NOT that it's
a good idea to go lopping off your arm--unless you're in a Monty Python
movie--but that it isn't necessary fatal to the "whole" if certain body
parts are lost.

In fact, when we really think about Leopold's proviso in terms of a body
analogy, instead of the machine analogy--e.g. his statement "If the land
mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good . . ."-- then the
first principle of conservation is even MORE questionable.  Ask anyone who
has ever come close to dying from appendicitis (too bad we can't ask the
ones who have died from appendicitis) whether or not he/she thinks "the
appendix is good."  If there was ever an example of a part that is NOT
good, well, the appendix would be my candidate.  (Yes, I lost mine years
ago, and I don't miss it.)

Perhaps this is what Michael Pollan was alluding to when he said that news
of a woodchuck megadeath in his neighborhood would hardly put him in an
elegiac frame of mind.

My point here is, again, emphatically NOT to advocate species destruction.
Rather, my point is to illustrate some of the philosophical weaknesses of
the "preserve all the parts" argument for nature preservation.  As a summum
bonum or even as a "first principle" of conservation, "preserve all the
parts" is a fairly *weak* argument for environmental protection.  I say
this not as someone who delights in environmental destruction, but as
someone who wants to see us using better arguments to protect nature.

Jim T.



>When people sincerely act toward
>that goal, even if they are mistaken in the means (as reported in the
>ivory ban) it
>seems to me that they are acting ethically. If insincere, they're
>unethical. In the
>latter case, calling it "unethical preservation" doesn't seem reasonable since
>preservation of the Earth and its naturally evolved systems is the primary
>ethical
>stance of those of the ecocentric persuasion. Of course, the humanists/
>anthropocentrists will label it "unethical preservation" because in their
>value/ethic belief it harms the economic livelihood of people.


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