Leopold professed an ethics founded on the biotic community – a community encompasses and includes humans:

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.

Leopold rejected the utilitarianism of conservationists like Gifford Pinchot and Theodore Roosevelt, who pursued a conservationism based on expediency, conquest, and self-interest. Leopold was instead an advocate of wilderness, and of its conservation for its own sake. For Leopold, the relationship of humans to the land was an ethical one.

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.

Leopold saw that humans are part of an ecological community. He saw that humans can thrive only if the entirety of the larger community of which we a part thrives.

But wherever the truth may lie, this much is crystal-clear: our bigger-and-better society is now like a hypochondriac, so obsessed with its own economic health as to have lost the capacity to remain healthy. . . . Nothing could be more salutary at this stage than a little healthy contempt for a plethora of material blessings.

Leopold preached “an intelligent humility toward man’s place in nature”, and warned that we should not stray too far from the land.

There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.

Leopold was a prophet for our times. We should have listened.

The ecosystems and biodiversity which underpin all economic activity depend largely on ‘wild land’ – very much a poor relation in the competition with agriculture and urbanisation, both of which have massive economic forces in their favour.

Agriculture is driven by the demand for food. This demand is growing because of the rising population and more demand for meat, which requires more land than crops. Urbanisation is backed by the economic power of manufacturing, and the influx of economic migrants from countryside to towns and cities.

Wild land has no such strong purchasing power to defend its position and, therefore, is set to decline, affecting biodiversity and ecosystems with disastrous consequences leading to reduction of tropical forest area, loss of species, and reduced capacity for absorbing carbon.

It is not essential for land to be left wild to be productive ecologically: agriculture and urban areas can be designed in ways which maintain ecosystems. But whether land is left wild or combined with other uses, the survival of the services ecosystems provide – such as genetic resources, good quality soil, available water, pollination - is an essential underpinning of the world economy and people’s livelihoods.

Anderson’s article is a good reminder that land use as we practice it in Oregon is – or should be – about preserving land solely for economic exploitation. It’s about more than saving farm land for agriculture, saving forest land for timber production, and making the best use of urban land. It’s about saving the world that sustains us all.

We forget at our peril: God is great; humans, insignificant.

But the war is never won. There’s always another UGB expansion, another application to destroy farm or forest land. The best that can be said is that in Oregon the flood of “development” has been slowed, compared to what would otherwise be, as seen in other states – California, Washington, Texas, Georgia – where growth has gone completely unchecked and its devastation has spread, a cancer metastasized across the landscape.

Land use activists have never dared, still do not dare, to admit that we’re against growth. Lacking the courage to take on the zeitgeist and admit what we really think and believe, we instead dissemble that we’re for smart growth – an oxymoron if there ever was one, as the phenomenon of global warming is making clear.

Land use activists are not alone in their error. Tim Murray observes that the environmental movement as a whole has failed to identify and grapple with the real enemy, and asks: What if we stopped fighting for preservation and fought economic growth instead?

Each time environmentalists rally to defend an endangered habitat, and finally win the battle to designate it as a park “forever,” as Nature Conservancy puts it, the economic growth machine turns to surrounding lands and exploits them ever more intensively, causing more species loss than ever before, putting even more lands under threat. For each acre of land that comes under protection, two acres are developed, and 40% of all species lie outside of parks. Nature Conservancy Canada may indeed have “saved” – at least for now – two million acres, but many more millions have been ruined. And the ruin continues, until, once more, on a dozen other fronts, development comes knocking at the door of a forest, or a marsh or a valley that many hold sacred. Once again, environmentalists, fresh from an earlier conflict, drop everything to rally its defense, and once again, if they are lucky, yet another section of land is declared off-limits to logging, mining and exploration. They are like a fire brigade that never rests, running about, exhausted, trying to extinguish one brush fire after another, year after year, decade after decade, winning battles but losing the war.

Despite occasional setbacks, the growth machine continues more furiously, and finally, even lands which had been set aside “forever” come under pressure. As development gets closer, the protected land becomes more valuable, and more costly to protect. Then government, under the duress of energy and resource shortages and the dire need for royalties and revenue, caves in to allow industry a foothold, then a chunk, then another. Yosemite Park, Hamber Provincial Park, Steve Irwin Park… the list goes on. There is no durable sanctuary from economic growth. Any park that is made by legislation can be unmade by legislation. Governments change and so do circumstances. But growth continues and natural capital shrinks. And things are not even desperate yet. . . .

Environmental watchdogs bark, but the growth caravan moves on.

Murray argues the practice of designating hallowed places as nature reserves must no longer be seen as “victories,” but rather as concessions. The same holds true in the land use arena: there’s no victory in limiting the amount of land lost to UGB expansions, to urban reserves, or to real estate development.

Aldo Leopold ‘s vision of the land was ecological, encompassing the entirety of the community which the land embraces:

All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . . The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.

Saving what’s left of the land requires an explicit recognition of the ethical premises to which we hold, that humans are members of the land community.

It’s time to make our ethics explicit: the land is sacred, and is the ground of our being. It’s time to direct our energies into stopping the economic growth that is destroying the land – and inexorably, ourselves.

Real wealth has intrinsic value. Examples include fertile land, healthful food, knowledge, productive labor, pure water and clean air, labor, and physical infrastructure. The most important forms of real wealth are beyond price and are unavailable for market purchase. These include healthy, happy children, loving families, caring communities, a beautiful, healthy, natural environment.

Real wealth also includes all the many things of intrinsic artistic, spiritual, or utilitarian value essential to maintaining the various forms of living wealth. These may or may not have a market price. They include healthful food, fertile land, pure water, clean air, caring relationships and loving parents, education, health care, fulfilling opportunities for service, and time for meditation and spiritual reflection.

The fact that in the U.S. it’s mainly phantom financial wealth that is idolized and protected by our political system is a measure of how far the U.S. empire has already fallen from the heights of its glory days.

Think of the trillions spent propping up the financial system, while the ecological and social systems that sustain us remain ignored and untended. Faced with a crisis and limited resources, our leaders threw the real economy overboard, believing that the illusory wealth of Wall Street was what really mattered.

The first hint that something was very wrong with our civilization was in the early 1970s (corresponding with peak oil in the U.S.). That crisis was dealt with by jettisoning the dollar’s link to anything real, and by selling our souls to the Saudis and Middle Eastern oil. The crisis appeared to have been averted, and was followed by 30+ years of stability. But below the surface, the economy was rotting out, and for the first time millions of Americans were growing poorer rather than richer. John Michael Greer pinpoints the beginning of the first wave of catabolic collapse at 1974:

[T]he question is simply when to place the first wave of catabolism in America – the point at which crises bring a temporary end to business as usual, access to real wealth becomes a much more challenging thing for a large fraction of the population, and significant amounts of the national infrastructure are abandoned or stripped for salvage. It’s not a difficult question to answer, either.

The date in question is 1974.

The current crisis is the beginning of the second wave of catabolic collapse.

At some point, we’ll have to let it all go: the far-flung military bases, the carrier battle groups, the manned space programs, the financial superstructures that girdle the globe, the freeway networks with potholed pavement and crumbling bridges, maybe even the creaking electrical grid that powers our TVs, computers, video games, and air conditioners.

But we’ve already seen who will be getting screwed. The financial bailout confirms that it won’t be any different this time around.

Greenhouse gases are not the cause of global warming. They are but a symptom of:

300 years of our relentlessly exploitative, extractive, and exponentially growing technoculture, against the background of ten millennia of hierarchical and colonial civilizations. . . [T]he seductive promise of endless growth has grasped all of us civilized folk by the collective throat, led us to expand our population in numbers beyond all reason and to commit genocide of indigenous cultures and destruction of other life on Earth.

Global warming isn’t the only symptom:

[I]f planetary warming were to vanish tomorrow, we would still be left with ample catastrophic potential to extinguish many life forms in fairly short order: deforestation; desertification; poisoning of soil, water, air; habitat destruction; overfishing and general decimation of oceans; nuclear waste, depleted uranium, and nuclear weaponry—to name just a few.

Sacks says the battle against greenhouse-gas emissions is absolutely over, and we have lost – and that we need to find the courage to tell this hard truth.

Because of the vast inertial mass of the oceans, which absorb temperature and carbon dioxide, there’s a lag of several decades between greenhouse-gas emissions and their effects. The starting changes we are already seeing today are thus the result of atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide of well under 340 parts per million (ppm). Today, atmospheric CO2 is 387.81ppm and increasing at almost 2 ppm per year.

Then there are positive feedback loops, which we don’t understand and which haven’t been included in our climate change models.

And then there are “tipping points,” points at which change becomes non-linear. We don’t know where these tipping points may be, where Earth’s climate may suddenly shift into a different state as it has many times before in Earth’s history.

As Sacks says, these bitter climate truths are fundamentally bitter cultural truths.

Endless growth is an impossibility in the physical world, always—but always—ending in overshot and collapse.  Collapse: with a bang or a whimper, most likely both.  We are already witnessing it, whether we choose to acknowledge it or not.

Because of this civilization’s obsession with growth, its demise is 100 percent predictable.  We simply cannot go on living this way. Our version of life on earth has come to an end.

I think the course of action urged by Sacks is the only sane and honorable one:

The sooner we embrace the truth, the sooner we can begin the real work.

Until this research, the pace of the extinctions was thought to have been gradual, taking place over millions of years.

Carbon dioxide in the earth’s atmosphere has now risen to about 387 ppm – its highest level in at least 2.1 million years and probably 20 million years. If current rates of emissions continue, carbon dioxide levels could reach as high as two and a half times today’s level by the year 2100 – leading not only to hell and high water, but to global ecosystem collapse.

We’re truly playing with fire. And the best we can manage is the disastrous Waxman-Markey? Our political efforts, measured against the enormity of the challenge before us and the consequences of failing to act responsibly and decisively, are so feeble as to be laughable.

What else to do but laugh, faced with a catastrophe that is all but inevitable? Lucky for humanity that there will be no day of judgment.

You might expect those most responsible for creating a mess should be the ones to take the lead in cleaning it up. So much for American exceptionalism. Some example for the rest of the world.

The plan fails to address what Euan Mearns at The Oil Drum: Europe identifies as the heart of the problem that has led to the unprecedented global economic, social, political and environmental imbalance: The U.S. has been living well beyond its means for over 40 years.

A piece by Jerry Silberman at Energy Bulletin titled “What Strategy for a Green Recovery?” contains a cogent critique of the Obama plan, a few points of which follow:

What the Act does [is] primarily deferred maintenance on existing infrastructure and social programs ignored during the Bush years, and clearly many of these upgrades are needed. A look at transportation funding, however, finds 3x as much, $30 billion, for highways compared to $10 billion for transit. Symmetrically, airports get three times as much as Amtrak, although the admitted backlog need is highest for Amtrak. The underlying assumption is that we will not, and should not move away from the primacy of the private automobile. This is underscored by the huge proportion of research and science funding devoted toward developing electric cars. Missing is the arithmetic of energy consumption not only in cars but in an automotive based land use pattern, and an understanding of the realistic potential for renewable electricity.

The plan’s focus on “shovel-ready” projects to get immediate stimulative impact ensures that most of the money will go to roads and that none will go to the top-to-bottom rebuilding of our rail infrastructure that is needed to make any real difference. We’ve been planning nothing but roads for decades – so of course we don’t have “shovel-ready” alternatives. As Alex Steffen says, regarding transportation: when it comes to greening the stimulus, we’re not only missing the forest for the trees, we’re not even seeing the trees right.

Back to Silberman:

Speaking of energy, the press release does not define renewables, but we know that “second generation” agrifuels are high on the list, and Obama is pushing for increased ethanol, despite the rapidly growing global consensus that any generation of agrifuels is a disaster on several levels. The logic is very simple – since these fuels at best have a dramatically lower net energy than fossil fuels, and growing them will accelerate the destruction of fertile land, because all the nutrients are removed, not to mention the natural ecosystems destroyed, they cannot meet the need. . .

By continuing to fund the chimera of fusion power [and "clean coal" - ed.],  the report underscores what it says, in fact very directly: “the next great discovery” is needed to bail us out. This is a classic example of expecting to solve problems using the same ways of thinking which created them. What is really being pursued, or hoped for, is a perpetual motion machine. It’s not there. . .

Over $120 billion is devoted to health care, as supplemental funding for Medicaid, with $30 billion in subsidies to laid off workers to pay their COBRA….in other words, to pay private insurance companies. For that much money, we could establish Medicare for All national health, (HR 676) and put many more billions back in the pockets of workers, and the coffers of state and local governments, and make a real contribution to economic recovery.

Silberman concludes that “recovery” plan whose goal is a return to business-as-usual is doomed to failure:

The most unconscious and fundamental premise of this bill is that within a short time, the US economy will “recover” – new jobs, more cars, increased housing starts, and more energy consumption, albeit with some portion from “renewables”. This is the fundamental premise, and it’s a premise which guarantees its failure.

Sharon Astyk frames it as a moral issue in a most powerful and moving open letter – “Not Advice, but a Warning” – to the incoming president:

[Y]ou stand in Lincoln’s shoes today, having embarked on a project whose price is far too high, and whose moral legitimacy is questionable at best.  You’ve decided your job is to save the economy, and to restore the American people to prosperity. . . But that way lies tyranny, and moral failure.  To do so represents the tyranny of the present over their posterity – the extraction of resources that will be urgently needed by your daughters and my sons and their children.  The direction you’ve taken, which involves salvaging the failed industrial and financial projects of the rich, rather than serving the poorest, represents tyranny as well . . .

It is also impossible to accomplish – you will not restore us to what we were at any time in the recent present, because even then, we were not as we seemed – that is, virtually all the accumulated wealth of the last decade and more that actually percolated down to ordinary people was illusory, debt-based, and based on false assumptions.  And all the wealth of the last few decades has been based on a rapidly declining natural resource base that is now not merely depleted, but emptying.  You will not restore us to past versions of our prosperity, nor can you carry the moral water of the preservation of the future on the backs of a false and tyrannical promise.

Astyk has it exactly right: a return to what has been considered normal is neither possible nor morally defensible.

Berry lists the values associated with the family farm: conservation, independence, self-reliance, family, and community – values suited to a world lived in by human beings, not to a world exploited by managers, stockholders, and experts.

I think Berry is more right than he knows. We must transform our economy and rebuild it based on the human-scale values he treasures.

“The economy” is no more than an abstraction, a description of how we extract our living from and survive in this world. Valuing it more than the global ecosystem on which it depends is blindness and folly. As we see the world economy collapse around us, the evidence is compelling that industrial values – which place “the economy” above all else – are ultimately destructive of life itself.

Conservation, independence, self-reliance, family, and community: as Berry says, these are the values that offer us survival, not just as farmers, but as human beings. And Berry is right that the transformation that is required cannot be left to others:

“It] cannot be accomplished by the governments, the corporations, or the universities; if it is to be done, the farmers themselves, their families, and their neighbors will have to do it.”

So what was the G8′s bold response? To “move towards a low-carbon society” by endorsing the idea of cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050 while failing to set a short-term goal for actually getting their. And by the way, the 50% cut is from current levels, not from the 1990 levels that served as the baseline in Kyoto.

In other words, they set a target that guarantees catastrophic climate change and then failed to adopt any steps to actually achieve that grossly inadequate goal.

The G8 statement says: “Achieving this objective will only be possible through common determination of all major economies[.]” What ever happened to countries, to peoples, to polities? “Economies” don’t make decisions.

Hansen’s letter points out that responsibility for global warming is a physical fact, not an ethical statement; and is proportional to cumulative CO2 emissions, not to current emission rates. This is a result of the long lifetime of atmospheric CO2.  Responsibility of the United States is more than three times larger than that of any other nation. The United States, Europe, Japan, Canada and Australia are responsible for most of the fossil fuel CO2 in the air today. Looking at per capita emission, the United States and Canada are the largest emitters, while per capita emissions of Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom are about half that large.

The main concerns of the G-8, as laid out in the group’s joint statement, are to avoid the most severe consequences of global warming by cutting emissions, but only by guaranteeing “sustainable economic development” and “energy security.” Again paraphrasing, we’re willing to tackle global warming, but only if we don’t have to give up on our belief in unlimited growth.

Wendell Berry has a great article in Harpers exploring the Faustian bargain we have made. We will keep on consuming, spending, wasting, and driving, as before, at any cost to anything and everybody but ourselves. Our problem is more than prodigal extravagance – it’s also an assumed limitlessness, a trait reserved for the gods. Yet we have founded our present society upon delusional assumptions of limitlessness.

As the ancient Greeks knew, the inevitable consequence of transgressing limits is tragedy. In Greek tragedy, an important function of the chorus was to ensure that the audience does not forget things, to put the actions of the actors in context. Let’s hope that the audience is paying attention, that the end has not already been written, and that the only thing left for the chorus to do is lament.