I hope everyone has a chance to go outside and appreciate this beautiful world that we live in. Take a moment and hug a tree. No, I'm not kidding. I'd encourage everyone to climb a tree, but I think most of my readers - myself included- would probably hurt themselves if they tried.
I was going to share some excerpts from Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac as some food for thought today, but my friends have been making me laugh all day and I've completely lost my train of thought. Not that I'm complaining, laughing is a good thing. Anyway, Leopold wrote an insightful and philosophical essay titled "The Land Ethic" that everyone should read.
Here are a few significant excerpts from "The Land Ethic" that I have highlighted in my copy of the book:
An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct. These are two definitions of one thing. The thing has its origin in the tendency of interdependent individuals or groups to evolve modes of cooperation. The ecologist calls these symbioses. Politics and economics are advanced symbioses in which the original free-for-all competition has been replaced, in part, by co-operative mechanisms with an ethical content.
All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts.
The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.
-Aldo Leopold
1 comment:
Happy Earth Day!!!
I didn't drive downtown to Town Lake, instead I ran from my apartment. I also went through my co-workers trash and picked out the coke cans and water bottles so I could recycle them.
It's not much, but every little bit helps.
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