02/28/2001 Env Bd Packet - Laserfiche WebLink

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Weed Laws Article on Landscaping (John Marshall Law Review) won popular favor. The Endangered Species Act28 and the Marine Mammal Protection Act29 are two legislative embodiments of the biocentric view that Nature's elements are essential even though the economic benefits to humankind may be neither obvious nor direct.30 B. Esthetics Page 4 of 27 The second element of Land Ethic is natural esthetics - an appreciation of Nature as beautiful for what it does rather than how it looks.31 Traditionally, in most of Western thought, Nature was viewed in homocentric terms.32 Leopold challenged that perception and believed that rather than defining beauty m abstract temporal human terms, form followed function and that beauty was morc. cerebral than Perceptual experience.33 In the Sand County Almanac, Leopold described the wonders of Nature without resort to words like "glorious," "beautiful," or "sublime. "34 Before Leopold, the preservation of natural areas was consistent with a homocentric philosophy and almost exclusively a function of the area's visual impact. National Parks were carved out, areas that demonstrated a "take -Your- breath- away" quality.35 Consistent with the policy of protecting only the visually beautiful, the National Park Service engaged in facade management by eradicating predator species that prayed on popular animals, sprayir, pesticides, preventing natural fires and introducing aestheticall pleasing exotic plant species.36 This view is changing. Visual beauty is no longer accepted as an appropriate basis for preserving natural areas. Leopold's natural esthetic is now officially recognized. 37 C. Environmental Ethics Aldo Leopold's third governing concept of the Land Ethic is environmental ethics. Leopold considered ecology a moral mandate since the efforts of science "could only carry us so far. "38 "All science can do," he wrote, "is to safeguard the environment in which ethical mutations might take place. "39 The ethical obligation that the members of a natural system have is to "preserve the health of the system by encouraging the greatest possible diversity and structural complexity and minimizing the violence of man-made changes.i40 Environmental Ethics is akin to religion.41 Justice William 0. Douglas in his book, A Wilderness Bill of Rights, touched the same cord42 as did Laurence Tribe in his classic critique of the homocentric basis for environmental laws, Ways Not To Think About Plastic Trees.43 D. Aldo Leopold: A Pioneer Natural Landscaper Natural landscaping is the manifestation of the Land Ethic. The Land Ethic is summarized in Sand County Almanac: All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a http://www.epa.gov/glnpo/greenacres/weedlaws/JMLR.html 2/22/01