Aldo Leolpold on the land ethic: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” (A Sand County Almanac, page 224-225.)
One can write about the wildness of nature because natural selection is wild, but it is hard to write about morality in the context of nature because the way of nature – natural selection, or chance and necessity – is indifferent to morality.
Leopold tried to avoid a human-centered ethic, but he did not succeed. Preservation of the integrity, stability and beauty of nature is something humans sometimes seek because we associate them with existence. Natural selection has no such aim – no beliefs, no values, no purposes.
Natural selection is indifferent to existence and nonexistence. Humans are not. We have realized that our existence depends on the existence of the web of life of which we are part. We value that web, like we value integrity, stability and beauty, because the thought of nonexistence is so awful to us.
Integrity, stability and beauty: these are virtues or values. Philosophers have associated them with what is eternal and, therefore, transcendent. It is a strain to sustain belief that they are connected with nature or the cosmos after Darwin. It is hard to sustain belief that existence matters.
Lost Borders 
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December 30, 2008 at 3:45 am
Chris
‘It is hard to sustain belief that existence matters.’ That sounds rather sad and resigned.
If the statement ‘deus caritas est’ is true — God is love — then human existence, indeed all existence, matters because it is the object of universal love, a love that brought all things into being. Of course, one cannot prove this is true. So ‘the heart has it’s reasons that reason does not know.’
I agree, though, that nature is indifferent to us… and often cruel. Its very indifference nudges us to seach beyond it.
Peace to you.
December 30, 2008 at 4:45 am
Ken
Chris, thank you for your encouragement.
It is true I find it hard to sustain belief that existence matters and I associate that difficulty with the modern view of life, especially the view after Darwin. I think that difficulty can be correlated with “the fall” in Christian theology, with our estrangement from God. It is this tendency to see the human condition, the experience of life, as existentialists see it, that is part of my appreciation for existentialist theologies.
I think the existentialist response has been to acknowledge the difficulty, and yet to resist nihilism and to respond to it by living intensely, by saying “no” to this condition, rather than resigning oneself to it, which, in a way, is what Job did. It is a kind of searching.
I was thinking as an existentialist thinks when I wrote this posting. I was thinking about the meaning of Aldo Leopold’s land ethic from an existentialist perspective.
I think Aldo Leopold is an interesting writer theologically. He was critical of Christianity. At the same time, he used Biblical allusions so powerfully to develop his argument in A Sand County Almanac. For example, when he restored wildness to his land, he used language associated with the second coming to describe what happened, connecting the sound of the final trumpet with the call of cranes.
As you have written here, if the cosmos is founded on the love of God, then all existence matters – cranes and humanity matter – and if we could see behind the veil through which our reason cannot see, we would see that divine benevolence is the source and sustenance of life.