Necessary Steps to a Land Ethic:
the Struggle for Animal Liberation

Introduction

I will in this essay attempt to address (not necessarily to prove) the proposition that a broadbased extension of ethics to the land, in the context of Aldo Leopold's ideas, is still slow in coming primarily because nonhuman animals have not first been fully accorded moral status. Without this step, the idea of developing a truly moral view of ecosystems is to many Americans entirely laughable, the realm of hippies, freaks, and communists. According rights to trees? Most of us hardly skip a beat at the thought of veal-calf production or supposedly humane hunting sports. Until we have more overtly and completely redressed and reviled the ethos that human domination over nonhuman sentients is a God-given purpose, the likelihood of successfully fostering a non-exploitative relationship with the natural world as a whole is, I believe, very slim.

I use the word "liberation" in the title here advisedly. I am especially confident in the appropriateness of that word due to my reading of Roderick Nash's book The Rights of Nature. Nash argues that the extension of liberty, of the central ideals of the liberal tradition, to animals and nature is almost certainly the next step, as it were, following closely in the path of all (occidental) liberation movements, from those that led to the Magna Carta through the American and French Revolutions right up to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. However, I fault Nash, just as I fault Leopold and others, for his failure to draw a significant distinction between the fauna and the flora involved in any proposed system of land ethics.

Some Background

Nash manages to keep very clear his thread of rights-based morality expanding its horizons bit by bit through the centuries in Europe and America. His conclusions that the perspectives and activities of latter-day radical environmentalism were wholly inspired by the redress of racism and sexism follow succinctly from his historical narrative, as does his implication that the use of force in environmentalism is to be expected judging from its firm foundations in liberation movements of both the recent and more distant past. However, Nash's take on the role that animal-rights ideas have played in the development of environmentalism and environmental ethics is less clear.

Actually, the implication that animals acquiring moral status is an essential precursor to an environmental ethic is weaved throughout Nash's discourse. Where things get confused is that animal ethics is, by anyone's standards, far from resolved, yet Nash and others would have us move on anyway to the land as a whole, to ecocentric, consequentialist thinking rather than the principle-orientated, individual-level approach of earlier humane movements. In my view, "premature" is a good word for this hope, as I draw a different conclusion: the deep ecologists must feel that the older humanitarian views are actually preventing the development of a land ethic, whereas I consider that it is the incomplete acceptance of humanitarian ideals that is preventing further moral extension.

Indeed, Nash's discussion of the rift that developed in the 1970s and '80s between deep ecologists/environmental ethicists, like Arne Naess and John Rodman, on the one hand, and animal liberationists, like Peter Singer and Tom Regan, on the other is very telling (1989, pp. 136-153). Rodman, a political theorist and "self-styled 'radical environmentalist'" actually vilified the whole idea of "moral extensionism" (p. 152). One of the basic reasons for this rejection has to do with the strictly construed definition of a right. The primary difference between the rights-based liberation movements of the pre-1970s and their extension to animals and environment is, of course, that the latter entails a discussion of rights for non-humans. Yet, inherent in the idea of a right is the idea of an obligation; no right can attain without an obligation. That is, for example, if I have a right to freedom, it is morally wrong for others to infringe on that freedom; thus they have an obligation not to do so just as I have not infringe on theirs. (This in fact is a central paradox in any theory of liberty.)