Land Ethic (Paperback)

High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The land ethic is a perspective on environmental ethics first championed by Aldo Leopold (1887-1948) in his book A Sand County Almanac (1949). In it he wrote that there was a need for a "new ethic," an "ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it." The prevailing ethos for the US Forest Service in his day, from the founder of the USFS, Gifford Pinchot, was economic and utilitarian, while Leopold argued for an ecological approach, one of the earliest popularizers of this term created by Henry Chandler Cowles of the University of Chicago during his early 1900s research at the Indiana Dunes. Conservation became the preferred term for the more anthropocentric model of resource management, while the writing of Leopold and his inspiration, John Muir, led to the development of environmentalism.