In his classic essay, “The Land Ethic”, Aldo Leopold wrote
A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
A more succint summary of the goals for biodiversity conservation is hard to imagine. And yet...
If you think about it, Leopold's statement raises as many questions as it answers. How do we tell if a thing “preserves the integrity, stability, and beauty of jthe biotic community”? The “balance of nature” was a popular and influential concept in ecology as recently as the 1970s, but since then we've learned that biotic communities are rarely in balance. Just compare the two photos of Leopold's sand county farm (images from the Aldo Leopold Foundation web site):
The sand county farm that Leopold loved is not the same farm visitors find today. If it's not the same farm, exactly how did Leopold's work on the farm preserve its “integrity and stability”? Leopold planted trees and sawed them down. He didn't leave the land untouched. And he admitted to prejudices in favor of some species and against others.
I share Leopold's prejudices, but I'd like to have a foundation for biodiversity conservation firmer than a sand bank along a Wisconsin stream. That's one of the purposes for this weblog -- to provide a place where I can try to work through these ideas and, I hope, to provoke discussion and commentary that will help us all to refine them.
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