An Ethical Obligation to Democratic Land Management: Aldo Leopold’s Philosophy in Practice Anonymous College

A fundamental property of humanity is our tendency to frame issues economically: to attempt to understand our world by assigning numerical values to things which were conceived independently of this rigid economic structure. Presented with a set of alternatives, we often make rankings, or lists of benefits and disadvantages of each alternative, or weigh the alternatives with respect to some sort of value that we perceive they each offer us. It’s unclear whether this process is appropriate for judging our interaction with something as seemingly chaotic as nature: perhaps this schema is just our best attempt at devising a quasi-algorithmic and universal method to simplify inherently complex decision-making processes. Whatever the case, this economic underpinning so deeply permeates the human psyche that it not only affects the explicit decision-making process, but it also colors our most basic perception of the world around us. In other words, we try to understand the world as if it were created with economic considerations in mind, when this isn’t necessarily (indeed, probably isn’t) the case.

Problems with this construction arise when dealing with issues in a community, where different alternatives hold different values to each...