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There is as yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it. The land relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations. Obligations have no meaning without conscience, and the problem we face is the extension of the social conscience from people to land.
No important change in ethics was ever accomplished without an internal change in our intellectual emphasis, loyalties, affections, and convictions. The proof that conservation has not yet touched these foundations of conduct lies in the fact that philosophy and religion have not yet heard of it. In our attempt to make conservation easy, we have made it trivial.
Aldo Leopold
Copyright Mendocino Environmental Center 2004
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