This article about land ethic or lack thereof was one of the best I’ve read as of yet. The idea that we need to be concerned with the well being of the land and all the life that depends on that land is a fundamental concept to any hope of sustainability. We must change the way use land, as to not ravage and disturb nearby lands and the way the educate people about conservation. We have in the past, massively transformed entire landscapes, uprooting whole ecosystems. Even one species removal, however, can still wreak havoc. The altering of the food chains is what causes this devastation. One of the biggest problems as Leopold states, is that we depend on the government to enforce environmental regulations and protect our environment when instead we need to be getting involved personally to make an effective change because the government is incapable of doing an effective job because of the large amount of private land ownership. In a sense, the only way to bring about these sweeping changes are by changing the way we view the land and our relationships with it. If it remains as is, that we just se land as its potential to make money, we will never fix the problems facing us because many if not most of the biotic community of an area does not have any commercial value, but is a key member in the ecosystem. It seems as it may already be too late to do anything worth wild to fix what we have done because entire continents have been changed and many predators that once played an integral part of the regions are long since extinct. Maybe the best we can hope for is the preservation of land that have not yet been totally devastated.
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