-Leopold/Dillard
-Introduce Portfolio Assignment (if there's time)
http://production.americanearth.loa.n4m.net/aldo-leopold/
"Ecology was the great emergent science of the 20th century, and its central insight was that everything is connected. Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) is often described as the father of environmental ethics, and his “land ethic” is a landmark in American philosophical thought. But the idea that “a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community” is as much a pragmatic insight as an ethical one, and it grew from a lifetime out in the natural world. After a rural midwestern childhood he went to Yale’s Forestry School and then entered the infant U.S. Forest Service, both institutions under the sway of Gifford Pinchot’s forthright utilitarianism. Much of his early career was spent in the desert Southwest, and it was there that he began to develop the principles that made him the founder of wildlife management in the United States. His 1933 textbook Game Management is still in print—and so, of course, is his classic account, in “Thinking Like a Mountain,” of the day he changed his mind about killing wolves, the key Damascus Road story of American environmental conversion. In 1924, he helped to preserve the Gila Wilderness, part of New Mexico’s Gila National Forest; in 1935 he joined Bob Marshall, Benton MacKaye, and others in founding The Wilderness Society.
He was moving beyond Pinchot—or perhaps synthesizing the warring impulses of Pinchot and his old adversary John Muir—when he decided that effective conservation required truly wild lands as a baseline. But his vision went well beyond wilderness. In many ways his “land ethic” offered an early attempt to ground environmentalism in every action and decision. It was his words in A Sand County Almanac (1949) that would provide his greatest legacy: the explicit recognition that the human community needed to extend its boundaries to include “soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” He died fighting a brush fire near his Sand County shack"-American Earth course website
In groups: Pull out
-a favorite quote
-a question
-and a connection to your Casey Land Project
from one of the texts.
"Despite nearly a century of propaganda, conservation proceeds at a snails pace."
ReplyDeletewhat can be done to speed up the process of conservation?
The Casey Land project is trying to bring awareness and education to conservation.
Camille
Jodi
Chelsea
Kyle
Chelsey, Steve, Sam, Emily
ReplyDeleteFecundity
"I don't know what it is about fecundity that so appalls. I suppose it is the teeming evidence that birth and growth, which we value, are ubiquitous and blind, that life itself is so astonishingly cheap, that nature is as careless as it is bountiful, and that with extravagance goes a crushing waste that will one day include our own cheap lives..."
Why is the reading so appalling? Because it is disgusting or because it reminds us of our own lives or because it makes us nervous/cautious to think about nature being so careless.
We connect this back to our Casey Land Project because we wand the same reproduction to happen to the plants as it did in the story to the worms.
"A land ethic of course cannot prevent the alteration, management, and use of these 'resources,' but it does affirm their right to continued existence, and, at least in spots, their continued existence in a natural state."
ReplyDeleteHow will your proposal for the Casey Land project help preserve the land in its natural state?
The Casey Land project is attempting to maintain a natural state in an otherwise developed farmland.
Megan
Victoria
Matt
Timothy
Long Nguyen
ReplyDeleteKelsey Keiran
Travis Truitt
Tyler Main
dillon baker
How can we implement our strategies of sustainability without interrupting the natural processes of life in relation to land?
Our group is focusing on the utilization of what the land has to offer and in regards to its potential use. Sustainability is one of our main focuses and we intend on putting emphasis on this quality throughout our project.