Re-Enchantment and the Land Ethic: When stones are ‘grandfathers’ and viruses kith and kin

An essay from about 2017 - pre-Catholic, but on the way

Stones are grandfathers

In his essay ‘The Land Ethic’, Aldo Leopold recognised that what is really significant about human beings is less our intrinsic value as individuals, and more our habit of imputing value to others. We have an evolved propensity to project value to anyone recognised as being part of family or community, and therefore morally considerable. All human beings perceive value in this way. What has changed through history is the boundary of community. On returning from Troy, Odysseus hung twelve slave girls for sexual misdemeanours. He did so casually, because the women in question were not perceived as being part of the community. Such brutality seems repugnant to modern readers because since Homer wrote the Odyssey, the ambit of moral consideration has been extended to include women and slaves. In The Rights of Nature Roderick Nash builds upon Leopold’s insight to present a reading of human development as a process of progressive liberation involving the gradual exten…