Except for (although not labeled) the cult of the wilderness.
I agree with all of you who said that we must care for our charges. But that doesn't mean turning, by fiat, the deed to the earth over to animals and plants. It doesn't mean that we don't put a road in because it comes near an where a snake, turtle, or other critters happens to be.
As I got closer to the end of Aldo Leopold's A SAND COUNTY ALMANAC, I discovered that hyping information about certain species, through a sort of bait-and-switch, was going on way back in the 1930's and 40's. Leopold didn't like that and said that conservationists should just be honest when trying to convince the public of the importance of conservation.
"When the logic of history hungers for bread and we hand out a stone, we are at pains to explain how much the stone resembles bread. I now describe some of the stones which serve in lieu of a land ethic.
One basic weakness in a conservation system based wholly on economic motives is that most members of the land community have no economic value. Wildflowers and songbirds are examples. Of the 22,000 higher plants and animals native to Wisconsin, it is doubtful whether more than 5 per cent can be sold, fed, eaten, or otherwise put to economic use. Yet these creatures are members of a biotic community, and if (as I believe) its stability depends on its integrity, they are entitled to continuance.
When one of these non-economic categories is threatened, and if we happen to love it, we invent subterfuges to give it economic importance. At the beginning of the century (20th) songbirds were supposed to be disappearing. Ornithologists jumped to the rescue with some distinctly shaky evidence to the effect that insects would eat us up if birds failed to control them. The evidence had to be economic in order to be valid.
It is painful to read these circumlocutions today. We have no land ethic yet, but we have at least drawn nearer the the point of admitting that birds should continue as a matter of biotic right, regardless of the presence of absence of economic advantage to us. "
Granted, the subterfuges Leopold mentions are economic, but it's still the ends justifies-the-means-fake-them-out tactic used today.
Back to the issue of "rights". As stewards of the earth, we have disgression on how to work in the garden, so to speak. Earlier in his book, Leopold humorously says that the critters that live on his property don't have a legal document that entitled them to be on his property, but they act as though they do. Leopold goes hunting, and also, like others, decides how, with ax and fire, he will manage the land. He advocates a land ethic and a way to keep the land in balance for nature and humans to use and enjoy and he's against killing animals just for the sake of killing and other forms of waste. Although the animals on his farm may think they own an area, they really don't. Leopold gives them their space, although he exersizes his right to responsibly manipulate the environment, governed by laws of nature, but the critters don't run the place like they did in George Orwell's ANIMAL FARM.
What's interesting is that often times it's easier to condemn private property and make humans move out and let the animals move in. This is a perverse, backwards way of looking at things. I was glad to see that that road that the senior citizen community wanted, that alledgely ran through snake country, got approved. Maybe there's hope for New Jersey!
There is a difference between a pig farmers right to due process and property rights and deciding how humans will conduct their activities in reguards to animal habitat. Logging where a snake's love life may be disturbed or building a house a mile away from a den of snakes is not an example of not being a good caretaker of animals. Nor is it an animal rights violation; animals don't have civil rights.
The excessive regulations and litigation over protecting so-called endangered species isn't helping to protect endangered species. It's just giving politicians, special interests and lawyers power and money. What is needed is what Aldo Leopold adovcated: A land use ethic. Leopold saw government involvement in conservation as just a temporary solution.
"To sum up: a system of conservation based solely on economic self-interest is hopelessly lopsided. It tends to ignore, and thus eventually to eliminate, many elements in the land community that lack commercial value, but that are (as far as we know) essentiall to its healthy functioning. It assumes, falsely, I think, that economic parts of the biotic clock will function without the unecomonic parts. It tends to relegate to government many functions eventually to large, too complex, or too widely dispersed to be performed by government.
An ethtical obligation on the part of the private owner is the only visible remedy for these solutions."
THE LAST statement embodies what former NJ Governor Christy Whitman was doing with private landowners. And there are examples of private landowers practicing a good conservation ethic and being good stewards of the flora and fauna on their property, to which at least one representative from a conservation organization testified.
But I wouldn't say that I put a snake before a person, just that it also has a right to life, though I'm sure there are people who do that.)
