What else? The United States chooses not to ratify UNESCO’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights, a document Eleanor Roosevelt believed would “establish standards for human rights and freedom the world over.” The nation’s capital, my father’s home, remains a segregated city. Even Red Cross blood is segregated. (Dr. Charles Drew, the African American physician who developed the blood bank—and a surgeon who worked with my mother at Freedman’s Hospital—had been fired from his job of coordinating wartime donations when he tried to end this government-approved policy.) And, in this decade, at least thirty-three persons, nearly all African Americans, are lynched.
Both Aldo Leopold and my father offered telling visions of American life at midcentury. A Sand County Almanac and Alien Land are inseparable in my thinking. Yet who else, then or now, would put these books on the same shelf?
• • •
After Odysseus returned home, the aged nurse Eurycleia informed him that a dozen of his serving women had misbehaved during his long absence, having slept with Penelope’s suitors. Odysseus hanged them. Leopold began “The Land Ethic” with a reference to the “slave-girls” in Homer’s Odyssey, noting that the “ethical structure of that day . . . had not yet been extended to human chattels.” He continued:
An ethic, ecologically, is a limitation on freedom of action in the struggle for existence. An ethic, philosophically, is a differentiation of social from anti-social conduct. These are two definitions of one thing. The thing has its origin in the tendency of interdependent individuals or groups to evolve modes of co-operation. The ecologist calls these symbioses. Politics and economics are advanced symbioses in which the original free-for-all competition has been replaced, in part, by co-operative mechanisms with an ethical content. . . .
There is as yet no ethic dealing with man’s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. Land, like Odysseus’ slave-girls, is still property. The land-relation is strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations.
Leopold added that an ethic could be regarded “as a mode of guidance for meeting ecological situations so new or intricate, or involving such deferred reactions, that the path of social expediency is not discernible to the average individual.” As “a kind of community instinct in-the-making,” ethics rested on the premise “that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts” now enlarged to include the land. Then: “This sounds simple: do we not already sing our love for and obligation to the land of the free and the home of the brave? Yes, but just what and whom do we love?”
At fourteen I wondered who, exactly, “we” are. I wondered, too, what and whom “we” love. Neither an equality of interdependence nor an evenness of cooperation seemed to underlie this country’s human relations. Not in the internment of Japanese Americans just seven years before Leopold’s and my father’s books appeared. Nor in the de facto and de jure segregation that so many Americans took for granted as the second half of the twentieth century began.
If viewed as a trophic or food strategy, one group of people acting upon another by imposing values, definitions, or violence could be seen as deriving part of its energy by consuming or controlling the energies of others. Or so I thought in an ecology course where definitions of parasitism and predator-prey dynamics seemed disturbingly close to some human relations.
Calling morality prescriptive rather than descriptive of behavior, one commentary on Leopold’s land ethic argued that “moral consciousness is expanding more rapidly now than ever before.” Despite continued failings in moral practice, the author cited as evidence emergent moral ideals like civil rights, human rights, and women’s liberation. “Most educated people today,” he added, “pay lip service at least to the ethical precept that all members of the human species, regardless of race, creed, or national origin, are endowed with certain fundamental rights which it is wrong not to respect.” Well-meaning acquaintances have also told me that civil rights laws and a growing attention to human rights now address root causes of human ills. They’ve suggested that racism, class conflict, sexism, homophobia, and xenophobia could well become isolated aberrations or vestiges of the way things used to be. Just as slavery, dispossession, and internment became things of the past, they say, so can these. “Don’t you know we’re becoming a post-racial society?”
What have I missed?
Perhaps the sphere of ethical relevancy has expanded outward among “educated people” to embrace race, gender, and class in theory if not practice. But who lives in theory, or benefits from lip service? Without backing belief or means, “rights” become limited and limiting to legal form and process rather than a moral imperative extending from heart and spirit. It still matters to me that more than three score years after the Supreme Court ruled segregation in American public schools unconstitutional, separate and unequal education remains the embedded norm.
A great many things have changed since 1949. Much has not.
With origins from all parts of the world, “we the people” inherit and share the contradictions of this nation’s growth. We carry this history within us, the past becoming present in what we think and do, in who we think we are. It informs our senses of place on Earth and our ties with each other.
A child born today enters a world of rapid and extensive change. The list is often repeated: Human population continues to grow. Ecosystems around the world have never before been so fragmented or degraded, resulting in great losses to the diversity of life. Coal, petroleum, and other fossil hydrocarbons, once abundant and seemingly cheap “resources,” literally fueled industrial revolutions and the mechanization of food production. And because of this fossil-fuel economy, greenhouse gas levels continue to climb, exceeding the highest atmospheric concentrations since our species evolved.
The pace and degree of such environmental changes are unprecedented in human history. Yet the embedded systems and norms behind them in the United States, the most energy-consumptive nation, are not. Their deep roots allowed and continue to amplify fragmented ways of seeing, valuing, and using nature, as well as human beings.
Consider the “ecological footprint.” Its estimate can mask how exploitations of land and of people are intertwined. Quantifying the area of productive land and water needed to provide ecosystem “services” or resources that are used (like clean water, food, fuel), and wastes then generated, gives but a partial measure of the biosphere’s regenerative capacity. And by this measure alone humanity’s footprint already exceeds Earth’s ecological limits.
But American prosperity and progress have come at great human costs, too. Forced removals of the continent’s Native peoples yielded land to newcomers from Europe and their descendants. The new republic’s economy grew upon a foundation of industrial agriculture built and powered by enslaved workers. Consuming other people’s labor, dispossessing other people of land and life connection to it, devaluing human rights, and diminishing one’s community, autonomy, and health—these are not just events of the past. In a globalizing world, American agribusiness giants have profited from the products of enslaved labor in Brazil at a seemingly safe moral distance. And far too many degraded environments in the United States are also citizens’ homes—in nearly all states with hazardous waste facilities, high percentages of people of color and the economically poor live, and die, next to those sites. Witness, too, farm workers in pesticide-laden fields whose health and lives are rarely recognized as a cost of producing cheap food.
A wiser measure of the ecological footprint would include people, or at least their labor. It might factor in the losses of relationships with land or home, losses of self-determination, and losses of health or life. What if the footprint measured, over time, on whom and what the nation’s foot has trod—that is, who has paid for prosperity?
ALIEN LAND.