The Land Ethic and the Expansion of Moral Community

Last Updated May 9, 2026

The land ethic matters for sustainable systems because it redefines the scope of moral concern. It asks whether human beings stand above the natural world as managers, owners, consumers, and conquerors, or within it as members of a wider biotic community. Aldo Leopold’s land ethic remains one of the most important interventions in environmental thought because it shifts the moral question from how nature can be used efficiently to how human beings should live responsibly within ecological systems they neither created nor fully control.

In that shift, moral community expands beyond human society alone. It begins to include soils, waters, plants, animals, habitats, ecological relationships, and the living conditions that make land more than property, scenery, resource stock, or productive substrate. The land ethic therefore does not merely recommend better conservation practice. It changes the moral status of land itself.

The deeper reason Leopold still matters is that environmental crisis is not only a problem of pollution, depletion, habitat loss, climate disruption, or inefficient governance. It is also a problem of moral imagination. Societies that regard land primarily as property, timber as inventory, water as service flow, animals as units of management, and ecosystems as inputs to human systems will build different laws, markets, institutions, and habits than societies that treat the living world as morally considerable.

Leopold’s land ethic intervenes at exactly this level. It asks whether ethics should remain confined to relations among human beings or whether it should expand to reflect ecological membership, dependence, restraint, and responsibility. That expansion remains foundational to environmental ethics, conservation thought, ecological restoration, sustainability theory, and the moral architecture of stewardship.

The central question is not whether human beings may use land. Human life is material and ecological; it depends on food, water, shelter, energy, settlement, and work. The question is whether use is governed by membership, humility, reciprocity, and care — or by domination disguised as management.

This article argues that the land ethic matters because it offers one of the clearest frameworks for understanding the expansion of moral community beyond the human. It examines how Leopold’s thought emerged, what it means to extend ethics to land, how the land ethic relates to stewardship, ecological integrity, conservation biology, restoration, and systems thinking, why the distinction between conqueror and member remains morally powerful, why the land ethic has been criticized and contested, and why it still offers a serious challenge to property-centered, extraction-centered, and purely instrumental views of nature.

Why This Belongs in Stewardship & Ethics

The land ethic belongs in Stewardship & Ethics because it asks what stewardship means once the land itself becomes part of moral community. Stewardship can be understood narrowly as careful management of resources. Leopold’s land ethic pushes further. It asks whether human beings should relate to land not merely as users or managers, but as members of a biotic community whose integrity places moral claims on human action.

This matters because stewardship can become too managerial if it leaves the underlying hierarchy untouched. A society may speak of stewardship while still treating land as an owned asset, ecosystems as service providers, wildlife as inventory, and watersheds as infrastructure for human use. The land ethic challenges that framing. It asks whether stewardship must be rooted in membership rather than ownership, restraint rather than domination, and ecological responsibility rather than technical control.

The article belongs in this pillar because the land ethic is one of the major bridges between environmental ethics and sustainable systems. It connects moral philosophy with ecology. It connects conservation with humility. It connects land use with community membership. It connects sustainability with the question of whether human institutions are capable of recognizing moral claims beyond the human.

The land ethic also clarifies why care for the land cannot be reduced to sentiment. Leopold’s framework is not simply about loving nature or preserving beautiful scenery. It is about expanding ethics so that the living systems on which human flourishing depends are no longer treated as morally inert. Soils, waters, plants, animals, and ecological relationships become part of the field of responsibility.

Stewardship & Ethics therefore treats the land ethic as foundational. It helps explain why sustainability is not only a technical project of managing limits, but an ethical project of enlarging moral attention until it becomes adequate to ecological reality.

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What the Land Ethic Means

The land ethic is Aldo Leopold’s proposal that ethics should be enlarged to include the land itself, understood not merely as soil or property but as an ecological community composed of soils, waters, plants, animals, and the relationships among them. The core claim is not that human beings cease to matter. It is that moral regard should no longer stop at the boundary of human society.

Leopold’s famous formulation describes right action as conduct that preserves the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. However debated that wording has become, its importance lies in the moral expansion it performs. Land is no longer merely the stage on which ethics happens. Land becomes part of the community ethics must address.

This matters because the land ethic changes the kind of question ethics asks. Instead of asking only whether an action benefits humans, respects private property, or efficiently produces goods, it asks whether the action preserves or damages the living community of which humans are members. The land ethic therefore shifts attention from human advantage alone to ecological membership and community integrity.

The term “land” is also broader than ordinary usage suggests. Leopold’s land is not simply terrain. It includes water, soils, plants, animals, microbial life, nutrient cycles, predator-prey relations, hydrological patterns, and the living fabric of ecological interdependence. It names a biotic community rather than an object.

To understand the land ethic is therefore to understand a transformation in moral scope. It does not eliminate human-centered concerns such as health, livelihood, food, shelter, and justice. Rather, it insists that those concerns exist within a wider living order that also deserves moral attention.

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Why the Land Ethic Matters

The land ethic matters because it addresses a basic failure in modern social thought: the tendency to treat land as an object of use before it is treated as a community of life. When land is interpreted primarily as property, commodity, productive substrate, development opportunity, or resource base, ethical reflection often becomes secondary to utility. Leopold reverses that order. He asks societies to consider whether land has moral significance before it is converted into human benefit.

This matters for sustainable systems because systems are shaped by the moral assumptions embedded in their design. A society that views forests as timber reserves will govern differently from one that sees forests as living communities. A political economy built around extraction will not reach the same institutional conclusions as one shaped by custodianship, reciprocity, and ecological restraint. A water system treated as a service flow will be governed differently from a watershed understood as a living relation.

The land ethic therefore operates upstream from policy. It shapes the moral vocabulary through which ecological systems are perceived and judged.

The land ethic also matters because it remains one of the strongest conceptual bridges between ethics and ecology. It does not treat ecology as morally irrelevant description. Nor does it treat ethics as detached moralism floating above the natural sciences. Instead, it suggests that ecological understanding should transform moral consciousness.

Once one understands land as a living system, old moral categories become inadequate. Property rights remain important, but they are no longer morally absolute. Use remains necessary, but it must be disciplined by restraint. Management remains useful, but it must be humbled by membership. Conservation remains practical, but it becomes ethical as well as technical.

That synthesis remains one of Leopold’s enduring contributions: ecological knowledge should enlarge the moral imagination.

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Leopold and the Expansion of Ethics

Leopold’s distinctive move was to treat ethics as historically expandable. In his account, ethics had already grown from relations between individuals to relations between individuals and society. The next step was to extend ethics to the land. This expansionary logic remains one of the most fertile ideas in environmental thought because it frames environmental ethics not as a rejection of moral tradition but as its further development.

This matters because it presents the land ethic as a thesis about moral maturity. The land ethic does not discard existing duties among persons. It asks whether those duties remain incomplete if they ignore the ecological conditions of life itself. Human justice depends on land, water, climate, biodiversity, soil, food systems, and ecological continuity. A moral framework that protects human relations while ignoring the living systems that make those relations possible is not complete.

Seen this way, the expansion of ethics is also an expansion of realism. Human beings are ecologically embedded. They depend on soils, waters, species relations, climate stability, and landscape processes they do not author. A moral framework that excludes those dependencies risks becoming both ecologically naive and ethically stunted.

The land ethic matters because it attempts to bring moral thought into closer alignment with ecological fact.

This expansion also challenges inherited boundaries of moral concern. Human-centered ethics asks what persons owe one another. The land ethic asks whether persons also owe duties to the ecological communities that sustain them. The result is not a simple replacement of human ethics by environmental ethics. It is a widening of ethical community so that human obligation is situated within the living world rather than above it.

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From Conqueror to Member

One of Leopold’s most powerful ideas is the contrast between the human being as conqueror of the land-community and the human being as plain member and citizen of it. This contrast is central because it reframes the meaning of power. The conqueror stance interprets land as subordinate to human will. The member stance interprets human beings as participants in a larger order whose integrity they are bound to respect.

That shift is one of the deepest moral moves in twentieth-century environmental thought.

This matters because sustainable systems are weakened whenever institutions retain the conqueror mentality beneath greener rhetoric. Technical efficiency can coexist with domination. Conservation can coexist with managerial arrogance. Sustainability language can coexist with assumptions that land exists fundamentally to be optimized for human systems. Green growth can coexist with extraction if the underlying moral relationship remains unchanged.

Leopold’s language interrupts that conceit. Membership implies limit, reciprocity, humility, dependence, and a different understanding of legitimacy. A member of a community does not possess unrestricted license over the community. A member acts within relationships and obligations.

The conqueror model is ethically dangerous because it misunderstands both knowledge and power. The conqueror imagines control but often lacks ecological understanding. The conqueror simplifies complex systems, mistakes short-term gain for mastery, and treats unintended consequences as externalities. The member recognizes that ecological systems are older, more complex, and less fully controllable than human plans admit.

This section connects directly with the broader logic of stewardship. If the conqueror treats possession as license, the member treats authority as bounded by community. The land ethic therefore supports a stewardship model of human power rather than a dominion model.

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Moral Community Beyond the Human

The land ethic is among the clearest arguments for expanding moral community beyond the human. That expansion does not necessarily imply that every nonhuman entity has the same kind of moral standing as a person. Nor does it remove all difficult choices about competing goods. What it does imply is that ecological systems, species, and land communities cannot be treated as morally inert background. They enter moral judgment as more than tools.

This matters because modern institutions often assume that only human claims generate real duties. Environmental protections are then justified mainly through public health, economic security, recreation, ecosystem services, or aesthetic preference. These are important grounds, but the land ethic presses further. It asks whether there is something wrong with degrading a biotic community even where immediate human harms are limited.

The expansion of moral community is therefore not merely emotional enlargement. It is a structural shift in ethical reasoning. It changes what counts as injury, what requires justification, and what forms of action are judged irresponsible.

If soils are merely productive surfaces, then degradation is a management problem. If waters are merely service flows, then contamination is a technical failure. If animals are merely resources, then population loss is an economic concern. But if land is a moral community, then degradation, contamination, and loss are also failures of membership and responsibility.

This does not mean every environmental question becomes easy. Moral community beyond the human raises hard questions about individual animals, species, ecological wholes, human needs, restoration choices, invasive species, development, agriculture, and conservation trade-offs. But the land ethic ensures that these questions are asked within a wider moral field, not reduced to utility alone.

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Integrity, Stability, and Beauty

Leopold’s famous triad — integrity, stability, and beauty — has been both influential and controversial. It is influential because it provides a concise moral vocabulary for ecological judgment. Rather than grounding environmental responsibility solely in human welfare, it directs attention to the condition of the biotic community itself. It asks whether ecological wholes remain coherent, resilient, and worthy of regard.

Integrity suggests that ecological systems have structure and relation. A wetland, prairie, forest, river, coral reef, or soil community is not merely a collection of useful parts. It is a living arrangement whose relations matter. To damage integrity is to damage the coherence of the community.

Stability suggests that ecological systems are not morally indifferent to destabilization, even if short-term gains follow. In contemporary terms, stability may be better understood alongside resilience, adaptive capacity, and the ability of living systems to continue functioning amid disturbance. The term should not imply that ecosystems are static. Ecological systems change, but not all change is equally healthy, reversible, or compatible with flourishing.

Beauty, in Leopold’s usage, is not mere decoration. It points to the felt and perceptual recognition that the land is more than function. Beauty names the encounter with living order, complexity, mystery, and belonging. It reminds readers that ethical relation to land includes perception, affection, and reverence as well as analysis.

The triad has drawn criticism. Some philosophers and ecologists argue that stability can sound too static for dynamic ecosystems, or that the formula can obscure trade-offs and historical disturbance. Those criticisms matter. They show that the land ethic must be interpreted carefully in light of contemporary ecology.

But they do not erase Leopold’s achievement. They show how fertile the land ethic has been: it gave environmental philosophy a vocabulary strong enough to invite decades of refinement and debate.

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The Land Ethic and Conservation Biology

The land ethic has had lasting influence beyond philosophy, especially in conservation biology. Questions of biodiversity, preservation, restoration, ecosystem management, wildlife protection, and habitat conservation are never purely scientific. They are always shaped by judgments about what in nature ought to be conserved and why. Leopold’s thought is part of that background because it helped normalize the idea that ecological wholes can be morally considerable.

This matters because conservation biology regularly confronts choices that are not purely empirical: what to preserve, why to preserve it, how to weigh biodiversity against competing interests, and what losses count as unacceptable. The land ethic does not answer every such question, but it provides an orienting premise: the integrity of biotic communities deserves moral regard.

That premise shaped later debates about biodiversity, restoration, ecosystem management, ecological health, and the ethical meaning of extinction. Conservation biology often works through population data, habitat models, genetic diversity, ecological function, species viability, and landscape connectivity. But behind those technical tools lies a deeper normative claim: the living community is worth protecting.

For sustainable systems, this connection is especially important. It shows that environmental ethics is not an optional layer added after scientific analysis. Ethics is already woven into how ecological problems are framed, how conservation goals are defined, and how environmental damage is judged.

Leopold’s legacy therefore extends into the institutional logics of sustainability itself. Conservation becomes not only the maintenance of useful resources, but the protection of membership, relation, integrity, and living inheritance.

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Stewardship, Restraint, and Responsibility

The land ethic matters because it reframes stewardship. Stewardship, in a Leopoldian sense, is not simply better management of owned assets. It is a morally disciplined form of membership in the land-community. Care for humanity and care for the land are not opposites in this frame. They are interdependent responsibilities within a shared order of life.

This matters because many contemporary uses of stewardship remain too managerial. They suggest careful use without challenging the underlying assumption that human authority is primary and land is a managed object. The land ethic deepens stewardship by insisting on restraint, humility, and community membership.

Responsible conduct toward land is not exhausted by efficiency, compliance, restoration targets, carbon metrics, or measured output. It must also be judged by whether it sustains the larger living order of which humans are part.

Stewardship requires restraint because not every profitable or technically feasible use of land is morally legitimate. It requires humility because ecological systems exceed human knowledge. It requires responsibility because land use is never isolated from soil, water, biodiversity, climate, and future inheritance. It requires care because land is not merely a substrate beneath human action but a living community that can be wounded, simplified, fragmented, and degraded.

This makes the land ethic especially relevant to the wider logic of Stewardship & Ethics. It clarifies why stewardship must be more than ownership with manners. It must become an ethic of answerability to ecological realities that precede and outlast any particular regime of control.

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Property, Ownership, and the Limits of Control

The land ethic also challenges property-centered thinking. Property rights are important in law, livelihood, housing, agriculture, and public order. But the land ethic asks whether ownership should be interpreted as absolute control or as authority limited by membership in a broader community. The question is not whether property exists. The question is whether property can remain morally legitimate when it ignores ecological consequence.

This matters because many environmental harms are lawful before they are recognized as destructive. A landowner may clear habitat, drain wetlands, overuse soils, fragment ecosystems, or degrade watersheds within the boundaries of formal permission. A corporation may hold title, lease, license, or concession while producing ecological harm that extends far beyond its property line. A state may authorize extraction while treating land as an economic asset rather than a living system.

The land ethic interrupts the assumption that legal control settles moral responsibility.

Ownership does not erase ecological membership. A parcel boundary does not stop water movement, species migration, nutrient cycling, fire risk, pollution flow, or climate consequence. Land systems are relational, while property systems often divide and abstract them. This mismatch is one of the deepest reasons environmental governance remains difficult.

A Leopoldian view does not necessarily abolish private property. It disciplines it. It asks whether ownership can be interpreted as a trust-like responsibility rather than a license of domination. It asks whether landholders, firms, public agencies, and states owe duties to the ecological communities affected by their decisions.

In this sense, the land ethic does not only belong to wilderness or conservation areas. It belongs to farms, cities, suburbs, forests, watersheds, industrial corridors, parks, ports, and working landscapes. Wherever land is used, the moral question of membership remains.

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Restoration, Biodiversity, and the Living Community

The land ethic remains powerful for restoration and biodiversity because it interprets ecological repair as more than technical recovery. Restoration is not only the reconstruction of function, the improvement of habitat metrics, or the achievement of management targets. At its best, restoration is a practice of responsibility toward damaged living communities.

This matters because restoration can be understood in two very different ways. In a thin technical frame, restoration repairs ecosystem services so that human systems can continue. In a land-ethic frame, restoration is also an act of humility and repair: an acknowledgment that human systems have damaged living communities and that responsibility requires more than extraction followed by mitigation.

Biodiversity deepens the same point. Species are not merely units of biological inventory. They are participants in living communities, bearers of evolutionary history, and parts of ecological relationships that humans often understand only partially. The land ethic helps explain why biodiversity loss is not merely a reduction in useful services. It is a moral diminishment of the community of life.

Still, restoration has limits. Some losses cannot be fully repaired. Extinction cannot be undone in any complete sense. Old-growth systems cannot be recreated quickly. Cultural relationships to land may be damaged in ways no technical project can fully restore. The land ethic therefore supports both restoration and precaution. It asks societies to repair what can be repaired, but also to restrain damage before restoration becomes impossible or incomplete.

A living community is not a machine that can always be reassembled after disassembly. That recognition is one of the moral strengths of Leopold’s framework.

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Criticisms and Contested Interpretations

The land ethic has not gone uncontested. Critics have asked whether it subordinates individuals to ecological wholes, whether its emphasis on integrity and stability can justify harsh interventions, whether it adequately addresses animal suffering, whether it leaves too much authority to ecological managers, and whether it relies on ecological assumptions that later science has complicated.

These debates matter because they show that Leopold’s framework remains philosophically live rather than canonically settled.

One major criticism concerns holism. If the biotic community becomes the central moral object, what happens to individual animals, vulnerable persons, or minority interests within the whole? Could the language of ecosystem integrity justify harming individuals too easily? This concern has animated debates between land ethics, animal ethics, conservation ethics, and environmental justice.

Another criticism concerns ecological dynamism. Ecosystems are not always stable in simple equilibrium. Disturbance, succession, migration, fire, adaptation, and transformation are part of ecological reality. A contemporary land ethic must therefore interpret integrity and stability in ways that acknowledge dynamic systems rather than freezing nature into imagined permanence.

A further criticism concerns social justice. Some environmental ethics have been criticized for focusing on land and wilderness while underemphasizing colonial dispossession, Indigenous sovereignty, labor, race, poverty, and environmental burden. A stronger land ethic must therefore be joined to justice. It must ask whose land, whose knowledge, whose burden, and whose authority are being invoked.

These criticisms do not make the land ethic obsolete. They make it more demanding. The point of the land ethic is not that it solves every environmental dispute. Its importance lies in how it changes the terms of argument. It makes it much harder to assume that environmental questions are only about efficient use or private rights.

The persistence of disagreement is a sign of depth. The land ethic remains contested because it touches foundational issues: the status of ecological wholes, the meaning of membership, the relation between human justice and ecological integrity, and the moral limits of human control.

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The Land Ethic and Sustainable Systems

The land ethic still matters for sustainable systems because many contemporary crises are crises of moral scope. Climate instability, biodiversity loss, degraded watersheds, soil exhaustion, fragmented landscapes, and ecological simplification all reveal the cost of treating land as subordinate to short-horizon human purposes. Leopold’s work remains relevant because it asks whether ethical concern has expanded far enough to match ecological reality.

This matters because sustainable systems are not built only through data, policy, finance, and technology. They are also built through the moral assumptions that define what counts as worthy of preservation. A sustainability framework that treats land only as natural capital, ecosystem service, carbon sink, risk buffer, or development constraint remains incomplete. Those categories may be useful, but they are not morally sufficient.

The land ethic offers a durable challenge to societies that want environmental resilience without moral restraint. It suggests that sustainability requires not merely managing land more cleverly, but rethinking the place of the human within the community of life.

For sustainable systems, the land ethic implies:

• land use should be judged by ecological integrity, not only productivity;
• property rights should be interpreted alongside ecological responsibilities;
• biodiversity should be treated as living community, not only resource stock;
• restoration should be understood as moral repair, not merely technical improvement;
• conservation should include justice, Indigenous knowledge, and community participation;
• human systems should be designed as members of ecological systems, not masters over them.

The real question is not only how to reduce damage, but whether institutions recognize the living systems on which they depend as members of moral concern rather than mere constraints on ambition.

Sustainability without the expansion of moral community risks becoming a more efficient form of domination. The land ethic asks for something deeper: membership, restraint, and care.

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Land Ethic Diagnostic Table

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Conclusion: The Land Ethic and the Expansion of Moral Community

The land ethic and the expansion of moral community matter because they ask whether ethics is capable of growing to meet the realities of ecological interdependence. Leopold’s answer was that it must. Human beings cannot remain conquerors of the land without also becoming destroyers of the conditions that sustain them. To live responsibly, they must understand themselves as members of a wider biotic community whose integrity places claims on thought and action.

This is why the land ethic remains one of the foundational ideas in environmental thought. It does not merely recommend conservation. It changes the moral standing of land itself. It enlarges the boundaries of community, challenges the conceit of dominion, and provides one of the clearest frameworks for understanding why sustainability is as much an ethical transformation as a technical one.

To take the land ethic seriously is therefore to take sustainable systems seriously. It is to accept that the future of human institutions depends not only on what they can manage, but on whether they can learn to inhabit the Earth under a discipline of membership, restraint, and care.

The land ethic does not solve every conflict between human need, ecological integrity, individual welfare, and more-than-human community. But it changes the starting point. It asks societies to justify their actions not only to human users and owners, but also in relation to the living systems they alter.

That shift remains radical because it exposes the moral poverty of treating land only as property or resource. It calls for a different kind of civilization: one capable of seeing land as community, use as responsibility, ownership as limited, and sustainability as membership in the living world.

A society that cannot expand its moral community to include the land will struggle to protect the conditions of its own future.

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Related Reading

• What Is Stewardship & Ethics?
• Stewardship Versus Ownership, Use, and Control
• Environmental Ethics and the Moral Status of Nature
• Responsibility in the Anthropocene
• Biodiversity Loss, Extinction, and Moral Responsibility
• Precaution, Prudence, and Irreversible Harm
• Intergenerational Justice and Long-Term Obligation
• Justice, Equity, and the Distribution of Environmental Burdens

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Further Reading

• Aldo Leopold Foundation (n.d.) ‘The Land Ethic®’. Available at: https://www.aldoleopold.org/about/the-land-ethic
• Brennan, A. and Lo, Y.-S. (2021) ‘Environmental Ethics’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-environmental/
• Callicott, J.B. (1989) In Defense of the Land Ethic: Essays in Environmental Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press.
• Justus, J. and Sarkar, S. (2016) ‘Conservation Biology’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/conservation-biology/
• Knight, R.L. and Riedel, S. (1998) ‘Aldo Leopold, the Land Ethic, and Ecosystem Management’, Society & Natural Resources, 11(3), pp. 269–273.
• Leopold, A. (1949) A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Nelson, M.P. (2004) ‘Teaching the Land Ethic’, Teaching Philosophy, 27(4), pp. 353–368.
• Norton, B.G. (1988) ‘The constancy of Leopold’s land ethic’, Conservation Biology, 2(1), pp. 93–102.
• Rolston III, H. (1988) Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
• Worster, D. (1994) Nature’s Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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References

• Aldo Leopold Foundation (n.d.) ‘The Land Ethic®’. Available at: https://www.aldoleopold.org/about/the-land-ethic
• Brennan, A. and Lo, Y.-S. (2021) ‘Environmental Ethics’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ethics-environmental/
• Callicott, J.B. (1989) In Defense of the Land Ethic: Essays in Environmental Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press.
• Heffernan, J.D. (1982) ‘The land ethic: A critical appraisal’, Environmental Ethics, 4(3), pp. 235–247.
• Justus, J. and Sarkar, S. (2016) ‘Conservation Biology’, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Available at: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/conservation-biology/
• Karp, J.P. (1989) ‘Aldo Leopold’s land ethic: Is an ecological conscience evolving in land development law?’, Environmental Law, 19(4), pp. 737–772.
• Knight, R.L. and Riedel, S. (1998) ‘Aldo Leopold, the Land Ethic, and Ecosystem Management’, Society & Natural Resources, 11(3), pp. 269–273.
• Leopold, A. (1949) A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Nelson, M.P. (2004) ‘Teaching the Land Ethic’, Teaching Philosophy, 27(4), pp. 353–368.
• Norton, B.G. (1988) ‘The constancy of Leopold’s land ethic’, Conservation Biology, 2(1), pp. 93–102.
• Rolston III, H. (1988) Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

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