hello and welcome to the first lecture on leopold and calicott now leopold was not a philosopher at least not by training and his writing is not in the straightforward style that's typical in philosophy he studied agriculture and he worked for the forest service in arizona for a time but mostly in the midwest where he was from calicott on the other hand is a philosophy professor in texas and he is one of the driving forces behind establishing environmental ethics as a branch of philosophy in the first place calicott's work is basically organizing leopold and presenting his ideas in the systematic and rigorous way that is expected in philosophy so we'll talk about these two together for that reason now what we have here with these two is sometimes called ecocentric ethics ethics organized around ecosystems rather than individual living living things for instance which will be biocentric ethics so what is an ecosystem i posted a video with a sort of frenetic guy explaining what ecosystems are but it's a good video it should be right above this video so if you haven't already i would suggest you pause this here and go watch that short video but basically an ecosystem is an organization of living things and the parts of their non-living environment when i say an organization of these things i mean that it's more than just living and non-living things all jumbled together they form relationships in which there is energy and resource transfer and these relationships have some stability so for exa so for instance all living things require nitrogen in order to make dna rna and amino acids and nitrogen is plentiful in the atmosphere as a gas but as a gas it's n2 which has a very strong triple bond that most living things cannot break so we can't just get our nitrogen by breathing it in through respiration and nor can animals or plants some bacteria but so there are bacteria that can break that triple bond and when they do that they create ammonia which becomes ammonium when mixed with water and plants can then extract nitrogen from ammonium and then humans and animals can eat the plants to get the nitrogen that they need and then humans and animals excrete some of that is waste which another kind of bacteria then feeds on in a way that changes it back into nitrogen gas and two and then the whole process starts over again so this is the kind of resource and energy transfer that i was talking about so the key thing here what makes the cell an ecosystem is that there is a kind of stability in the exchanges of nitrogen and also carbon water etc so that even though it looks like in an ecosystem it's like a war of all against all all different living things uh plants animals are all just destroying each other they really form part of this one self-reproducing network which is the ecosystem and all the parts depend on each other um and even though one living thing destroys another this is just how the whole ecosystem keeps itself going so the idea of an ecosystem is taken from the idea of an organism so if you think back to the wilson and the uh ralston reading uh where we are talking about the teleological nature of living things it'll help you understand what an ecosystem is just like an individual organism seeks homeostasis the maintenance of a certain balance that um so that the whole system reproduces itself constantly even as the individual parts come to be pass away and are replaced by new ones so an ecosystem seeks ecological homeostasis which is a balance of those living and non-living components that allow for these regular exchanges of resources and energy and in this way the whole ecosystem constantly reproduces itself even as the individual living things that make it up come to be passed away and replaced by new living things all of ecology is based on this analogy with the individual organism uh so with an individual living thing uh with an individual living thing something may seem bad like an injury for example but it might be good in the end because the injury was required for the whole organism to get the food that are needed so say a mouse injures its paw when it's going around getting its food if you restrict yourself just to looking at the paw that's injured it may look like this is a bad thing but if you step back to the level of the whole organism and what the organism needs you see that the paw is really only one member of a larger organism and you see that what matters is the thriving of the whole organism and if the paw has to be injured to get the food that maintains the organism then that injury is like for a greater good an even more clear example is how the mouse's body once it is injured redirects energy and resources away from other parts of the body to repair the damage to its pot and now if those other parts could you know think and talk and they they might object to this and they might say you know why are you taking the resources energy away from me to take it to another part that's not fair but what the in that case they would fail to see is that this redirection of energy away from them as parts is for the benefit of the whole organism including those parts themselves similarly when one animal kills another like when a hawk eats a mouse if you restrict yourself just to the mouse that seems like a pretty clearly bad thing but when you think that the mouse is really just one part of a larger ecosystem you see the mouse is really just a receptacle for energy and resources a temporary receptacle holding onto those energy and resources for a time until it gives them up to an animal like the hawk by being eaten by the hawk and this is just part of the circulation of resources and energy around the whole ecosystem so this event of the hawk killing the mouse is definitely bad for the mouse it destroys the mouse's homeostasis but killing this is just one small part of the maintenance of the ecosystem's homeostasis so if ecocentric ethics is correct one living thing killing another is comparable to what happens within the body of any living thing when for instance one molecule rips open another one and releases the energy contained in it this is nothing uh to be mourned because it serves to maintain the homeostasis of the larger organism it's necessary for that reason by the same logic within an ecosystem if a person kills an animal and eats it that is just a part of the same energy transfer and for that reason leopold says we now know that animal populations have behavior patterns of which the individual animal is unaware but which he the animal nevertheless helps to execute thus the rabbit is unaware of cycles like the nitrogen cycle the water cycle but he is a vehicle for cycles we cannot discern these behavior patterns in the individual or in short periods of time the most intense scrutiny of an individual rabbit tells us nothing of cycles the cycle concept springs from a scrutiny of the mass the whole ecosystem through decades when you step back and look at the larger process going on let's look some more about how leopold actually writes about these things so he says the mouse knows that grass grows in order that mice may store it as underground haystacks and if the snow falls and where the mice may build subways from stack to stack a rough-legged hawk is well aware that snow melts in order that hawks may catch mice he came down from the arctic in the hope of thaws for to him a tha means freedom from want and fear so leopold is identifying here the way one part of the ecosystem like having grass or having snow can serve or hinder the maintenance of the homeostasis of a given organism like a mouse or a hawk tall grass promotes the mouse's homeostasis and so does a snow-covered ground by shielding it from you know the view of a hawk but in but snow cover hinders the hawks homeostasis while the thaw suits it and this is not a complete exposition of leopold's argument but it's really just a way of setting up the problem if one in the same act is good for one like the hawk but bad for another like the mouse how do we sort out its real ethical meaning this is part of the criticism on ecocentric ethics launches against biocentric ethics like we see in rolston or regan leopold's answer to this problem is given somewhat cryptically more poetically than philosophically but i think we can make it clear if we reflect on it so he says this is kind of a flowery language but he says a deep chesty ball echoes from rim rock to rim rock rolls down the mountain and fades into the far blackness of the night it is an outburst of wild defiant sorrow and of contempt for all the adversities of the world every living thing and perhaps many a dead one as well pays heed to the call to the deer it is a reminder of the way of all flesh this chesty ball i should mention is like a wolf howling so to the deer that's a reminder of the way of all flesh you know the death death is coming to a pine to a pine it's a forecast of midnight scuffles and of blood upon the snow to a coyote that's a scavenger it's a promise of gleanings to come to the cow man a cattle owner a threat of red ink at the bank right loss of money to the hunter a challenge of fang against bullet yet behind these obvious and immediate hopes and fears there lies a deeper meaning known only to the mountain itself only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of the wolf so what does this mean we have again a single natural event the howling of the wolf but we have a proliferation of interpretations that are based on the homeostasis of various parts of the ecosystem for the deer this is a mortal threat for the cattle owner it's a financial threat for the coyote it's an opportunity uh to scavenge etc but this passage ends with this evocation of a certain image thinking like a mountain now this is i think the high point of uh leopold's whole book and we only have an excerpt of it here but i can tell you it's the high point of the book it's the dominant uh image that sums up everything um so what does it mean with all the time we spend analyzing arguments uh in a class like this it can be fun then to now dissect an image like this as if we were in a poetry class so here's my attempts first why choose the image of a mountain well mountains are big first of all so they're imposing they're majestic they command respect but uh they also have a a unique perspective one that is unique in being not a perspective at all because they're so tall that they're in a position to see everything and he says like you know they're so ancient that they've seen all this long process that the individual lifespan of another animal you know it's it's not enough to see so that's part of that being able to see the totality and not just being limited to one perspective so the mountains not limited to the partial perspectives that we have like with the deer the coyote the cattlemen the wolf etc but the mountain is silent also that makes uh that makes it also a powerful image it's silent and also it is only an observer it doesn't get involved in this give and take that is going on in the ecosystem the killing and being killed of the different parts of the ecosystem all this gives the mountain a kind of objectivity that the participants in the ecosystem lack so when leopold talks about thinking like a mountain i think he just means taking the point of view which sees the whole ecosystem all of the complex interrelationships he also mentions that a cattle man who kills wolves is not thinking like a mountain he does the world's work in the end leopold says because killing wolves allows the deer population to grow out of proportion since then the wolves do not kill as many deer which in turn leads to a disproportionate decrease in grass since so many deer eat away all the grass which leaves less grass for the cattlemen's cows so his cows end up dying anyway by killing the wolves still that ends up killing the cows right the wolves were gonna take some of the cows and kill them but uh you can't just like remove the part of the ecosystem which is the wolves and think everything else is gonna stay the same so the guide for how we should behave toward nature is to think of ourselves not as masters of nature but as members of it this is the land ethic uh now this is this lecture i'm giving like an exposition of leopold in calicut and then in the following lecture which you should watch next is when i give a critical evaluation of it so don't skip that