'The Life of the Land is Preserved in Righteousness'

Ua Mau ke Ea o ka Āina i ka Pono, the words on the state seal of Hawai'i, translate to 'the life of the land is preserved in righteousness'.

Aldo Leopold, the great conservationist writer of the last century, expressed a similar ideal when he wrote in his book A Sand County Almanac:

A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.

It is ironic when we note that the ecological problems which have destroyed the natural Hawai'i are directly contrary to what the words on the seal mean if given Leopold's intent.

It is futher ironic that the Utilitarians and biocentrists, those people who would from a glance seem to be closest to Leopold's beliefs, are most horrified at the implications, that humans should have no qualms about eating meat, among other things; and the anthropocentrics, those people who would seem furthest from Leopold's beliefs, are more likely to agree with the implications.

Thus, Leopold's land ethic is often cast as something not to radical, because the majority of humans are able to agree with its implications, the eating of meat, the allowance of hunting, agriculture, and other human occupations, as long as the "land" survives to future generations. Yet, if one analyses Leopold closely, they find that his "land organism" is composed of animals and plants, as well as non-living soils and water, on which he places intrinsic value. Very radical; not many in this age give value in and of itself to non-living things, and even less when he wrote it, 65 years ago.

He was able to do this because he he casts his beliefs in a non-individualist light. His statement was about "community", not individual organisms. Thus, "kinds", or species, have intrinsic value, something that is not found in the essays of the Utilitarians, completly outside the scope of the Biocentrists; thus, amalgamations of matter which are intrinsicly part of the whole ecosystem, the "land mechanism as he called it, are also intrinsically valued.

This melding of ethics and ecology is so beyond the bi-polar struggle of anthropocentrists and Biocentrists that it escapes the continuum, because it refuses to focus on the individual, instead focusing on something greater.

I find it is quite funny to see the head of both the anthropocentrist and the Biocentrist spin, in opposite directions of course, when this information is brought into play. The anthropocentrist cannot fathom giving intrinsic value to The Land, and the vegan Utilitarian cannot fathom eating meat.

In my opinion, both are wrong, both cannot accept cycles greater then their everyday workings, legacies that exist outside their daily grind.

When you get stuck on the individual, you loose site of the bigger picture. But when you focus on the whole, the individual is not elimiated. This Holism includes, not discludes. By focusing on the Land Organism, Leopold brings an ethic that is father reaching and more pertinent than the anthropocentrist and the Biocentrists could make working together.

Ua Mau ke Ea o ka Aaina i ka Pono, indeed.