Back to the Economy

Barbara's insightful comment makes me think again of how Leonard starts his article, with an analogy of how the ancient Greeks thought about and treated their slaves, to how we think about and treat the land and its resources. There is no monetary equivalent that could make up to a slave for being used, treated, thought of, as a slave - like there is no fair price on a human life. So Barbara's suggestion of examining whether "exchange" is ethical at all, is very relevant. If we consider that the land and all its creatures are there for our use, that our "manifest destiny" (early European/American concept of divine right: since God put it there, it is obviously for us to do as we like with) gives us the right to use every creature, and everything we can cut down or dig up out of the earth, we are treating earth as our slave. If we respect earth in the way that Winona LaDuke and other Native Americans describe, then we are aware of the earth and biosphere as an equal creature. The exchange she describes, of giving a bit of tobacco for the animals we kill in the hunt, for instance, or even for the herbs we collect from the wild, is symbolic of respect, it is not the same as placing a monetary or even a material, nutritional or other value on what we are taking. It is a statement, to ourselves, to our community, and to the community of wild things, of our respect, and of not taking for granted our right and ability to take whatever we want.

I also think it is worth thinking, as native peoples do, of the difference between taking what we need, and taking as much as we want. A workable land ethic does not require that we deny our needs or even our own desires. That (self-denial) is something we inherit from Puritanical Christianity, or other religions. We need to love and respect ourselves and our own place within the web of life, and within the cycle of life and death. I somehow feel that self-respect goes hand in hand with respect for others, and with respect for nature. A sense of give and take is different from assigning precisely equivalent values to things that are very different from each other. I also have an idea that what we do not "pay for", in some sense, as we go along, we will have to pay for in some form later on-- or our grandchildren will. That, to me, more than Leonard's idea of social approval/disapproval, is what must drive our ethics. Or, since I don't like the concept of "pay for", I should say perhaps, we must be mindful of what we are using, and alert to the ways we need to nurture the land, the forest, the community, in order that its health and our own may be preserved.