The legacy of Aldo Leopold includes the concept of ethical responsibilities toward the land, and the establishment of ecological restoration both for environmental learning and for land management. For more than a half-century, the land ethic has been a major paradigm for ethical and environmental thinking.

Keywords: land ethic, ethical responsibility, ecological restoration

**********

In 1998, Alvin W. Trivelpiece, then executive director of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, mailed a questionnaire to professional scientists asking them to look back at their training in science and identify the most important omissions in their own education. Their responses identified the highest priority as a need for a better background in ethical principles (Trivelpiece 1988). This is in line with the perception by Derek Bok (1988) that universities had exhibited a decline in ethical teaching since the 1800s. Bok sensed a growing need to provide students with training in ethical thinking about complex issues, especially in the face of increasing reductionism in the sciences.

Although there may have been a drift away from education about ethical principles, a substantial interest in ethics persists. Yet the focus on ethical issues among academic faculties seems to be hugely dominated by anthropocentric concerns--ethical relations among people, and particularly between professionals and their clients or colleagues (including medical ethics, business ethics, and honesty ethics). This anthropocentric focus is evident in the Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics (Chadwick et al. 1998), a four-volume set of definitions of ethics relating to interactions among people, which contains only one entry about ethical relationships between people and the environment.

Estrangement from nature

Given the evidence that professional training in the sciences has been short on education about ethical issues, and especially about ethical relations to the environment, we might ask how our society has become estranged from these ethical concerns. Why has there been so little concern for ethics relating to the biological system that sustains us (Orr 1992)?

Surely our sense of identity with nature has changed as our culture has changed. For example, people living in low*technology settings, such as the Inuits in the Arctic and hunter--gatherers in Africa and Australia, must maintain a high level of sensitivity to their environmental resources. Their survival depends upon it. Indeed, not only are people in those societies directly dependent on the natural world, but in many cases they maintain a sense of affection for its living components (Lopez 1986)--a sort of environmental aesthetic.

In an agrarian society such as the one that brought farming and ranching to the settlement of North America, people must have retained some sensitivity to environmental issues as they derived their livelihood directly from the land. But with the advance to an urban or metropolitan society, there has been a major disconnect between humans and nature. Our urban society is provided with mowed parks, paved playgrounds, plush automobiles to move us around on asphalt roads, housing with automatically regulated heat and cooling, and supermarkets with wheely baskets in which we can gather our food supplies...