Environmental ethics arose from the urge to extend moral consideration beyond the human. Leopold has served as a foundational figure and a theoretical foil in this pursuit.Footnote ¹ Environmental philosophers regard Leopold’s “land ethic” as one of the first serious attempts at articulating (1) what grounds the environment’s non-anthropocentric value, and (2) what moral obligations ensue. It also initiated a fundamental debate within environmental ethics, i.e., how to resolve conflicts between moral consideration for holistic entities (e.g., ecosystems) and individuals (e.g., human or non-human animals). Traditional interpretations describe Leopold’s land ethic as favoring holism over individualism. The biotic community would take moral precedence over individual rights.Footnote ² Environmental ethics has thus developed as an attempt to follow Leopold’s vision while avoiding what many view as the land ethic’s pitfalls.

In The Land Is Our Community, Roberta Millstein aims to offer a novel interpretation of the land ethic that sets the record straight regarding Leopold’s philosophy and shows that his views can help us navigate today’s global ecological crisis. The project is admittedly very ambitious, as it amounts not only to conducting serious exegetical research, revealing a nuanced interpretation of Leopold’s views, but also to defending these views in the context of contemporary ecology, philosophy of ecology, environmental ethics, and conservation policy. If successful, The Land Is Our Community would thus be quite an achievement on Millstein’s part.

Grounded in proper exegetical methods, Millstein’s historical work grapples with Leopold’s 500+ publications, encompasses his varied scholarly and hands-on experiences, and keeps an eye on relevant context. The result is a convincing debunking of the traditional interpretation of Leopold’s views and defense of a fresh take on the land ethic. In Millstein’s words (21):

Such interpretation of the land ethic rejects what Millstein identifies as six prominent myths about Leopold: (1) that the land ethic is contained in the infamous “summary moral maxim” found in his Sand County Almanac, (2) that land communities are best understood as ecosystems, (3) that Leopold valued ecosystems over individuals, (4) that humans are excluded from land communities, (5) that the land ethic relies on an outdated notion of ecological stability, and (6) that Leopoldian ethics is rooted in Darwinian protosociobiology. Central to Millstein’s interpretation are the notions of interdependence, land community, and land health, on which three core chapters of the book focus. There, Millstein’s goal is not only to set the record straight regarding the land ethic—which she eruditely achieves—but also to argue that, properly understood, the land ethic is consistent with contemporary ecology and relevant to debates in the philosophy of ecology and environmental ethics/policy.

Chapter 2 focuses on the notion of interdependence, the backbone of the land ethic. Millstein argues that interdependence is (exegetically, ecologically, and philosophically) best understood as an inclusive concept, including “direct and indirect ‘negative’ and ‘positive’ causal interactions between organisms (including humans), populations, and abiotic components” (48). The resulting network of interactions varies in strength, time, and space. The chapter is rather smooth sailing. The only conceptual difficulty Millstein faces concerns the extension of the notion of interdependence to abiotic components. The solution, she argues, is to frame interdependence as “vulnerability.” More challenging is the discussion of land community in Chapter 3.

In Chapter 3, Millstein aims to articulate an ecologically and philosophically defensible Leopoldian notion of land community as a “biological whole” (56). To do so is necessary for communities to qualify for “direct moral consideration” (77). First, Millstein clarifies Leopold’s notion of land community. Through impeccable exegetical work, she demonstrates that the notion blends the concepts of Clements-ish community and Gleason-ish ecosystem.Footnote ³ However, her argument that such communities qualify as biological wholes will likely be more controversial.

Whether ecological communities are biological entities and how to delineate their boundaries are classic and wicked questions in the philosophy of ecology. Millstein argues that communities can be delineated in terms of the relative strength of “survival-relevant interactions” (68). Communities need not be spatially congruent, vary depending on time scales, see their species composition change, and can be born or die off. The continuity of interactions through time is what grounds a community’s identity (70). This contrasts with pragmatic accounts of community recently favored in the philosophy of ecology, in which community boundaries depend on contexts of inquiry (Eliot Reference Eliot, deLaplante, Brown and Kent2011; Odenbaugh Reference Odenbaugh2007; Sterelny Reference Sterelny2006). Millstein rejects such views as leading to weak moral consideration for communities. Without a context-independent ontological grounding, her argument goes, community consideration depends on human interests. A multiplicity of scientific questions could lead to a multiplicity of communities, and thus to moral underdetermination (63). Millstein/Leopold’s notion of community, cast in terms of relative interaction strength, aims to solve that issue. Whether it succeeds or not should and hopefully will be discussed by the relevant scholars. One might wonder whether, for example, Millstein/Leopold’s idea of communities’ dependence on time scales raises underdetermination concerns akin to those faced by pragmatic views. Wherever such discussions may lead, Millstein has demonstrated the philosophical relevance of her Leopoldian notion of community.

That land communities be biological wholes is necessary but not sufficient for moral consideration. Moral consideration requires that entities possess “interests” that can be fostered or thwarted. Chapter 4 aims to show that Leopold’s notion of land health grounds land communities’ interests and thus moral consideration. Millstein characterizes land health as a capacity for self-renewal rooted in continuous energy circulation through a “tangled web of long food chains” (92) and relying on “biodiversity” and “soil fertility” (93). Distinct from both an outdated notion of ecological stability and a more contemporary notion of resilience, this notion, the argument goes, nicely dovetails with the most recent takes on the biodiversity/stability debate in ecology, so that it offers a “promising conceptual apparatus for future work” (100) in ecology. Millstein also argues that most of the common concerns regarding concepts of land health don’t apply to Leopold’s. For example, her notion of land health doesn’t tie health to a particular historical state. Millstein’s argument is overall convincing. One wonders, however, whether the discussion could have been more engaging if it had gone beyond classic disputes in the philosophy of ecology and touched upon more recent debates around the notion of health as spurred by Barnes (Reference Barnes2023) and others. Conversations around vagueness, pragmatism, and pluralism regarding notions of health could have enlightened the ecological concept Millstein defends. Leaving these considerations aside, Chapter 4 closes the core conceptual analysis of the book and thus opens the door to the more explicit defense of the land ethic, to which the last two chapters are devoted.

In Chapter 5, Millstein makes the case that the land ethic is both plausible and reasonable. Central to this case is a consistency argument: interdependence between humans is what grounds human ethics; once we recognize our interdependence with the non-human, consistency calls for our ethics to extend to the land community; hence the land ethic. Millstein devotes most of the chapter to defending the various assumptions underlying the consistency argument, including that interdependence grounds ethics and that human/human and human/non-human interdependence relations are relevantly similar. Millstein’s ambition is modest: she doesn’t aim to give a deductive reconstruction in favor of the land ethic but rather to explain how it provides a solid and plausible notion of moral consideration extended beyond the human. The land ethic’s vital insight, Millstein explains, is that “interdependence and vulnerability are fundamental aspects of our existence and thus the origin of our obligations to one another” (126).

Only one piece is missing from the puzzle: the connection to policy, which Millstein unfolds in Chapter 6. Leopold’s “Principle of Integration of Land Uses,” she argues, undergirds the proper process of conservation policymaking. It involves cooperatively coordinating the multiple values, interests, and perspectives at stake, wielding a variety of scientific tools, factual knowledge, and techniques, and keeping “the long view”—land health as the common goal—on the horizon. If this sounds like a tall order, that’s because it is: “Policy is hard,” writes Millstein (158). Are we setting ourselves up for an impossible task? To this concern, Millstein offers a proof-in-the-pudding rebuttal: she describes several examples of conservation work conducted along the lines dictated by the Principle of Integration. If it’s real, it’s possible. Roadblocks are expected and success isn’t guaranteed, and yet no better option exists than to bring people together and decide on the way forward by considering the best science and everyone’s interests while remembering that anything short of the long view will ultimately be self-defeating.

To conclude, Millstein presents a compelling case that Leopold’s land ethic, properly interpreted, offers “the environmental ethic of our time” (26). She demonstrates that her novel reading of the land ethic is exegetically accurate, consistent with current science, and pertinent to debates in the philosophy of ecology, environmental ethics, and conservation policy. Additionally, the book is highly accessible, engaging, and relatively concise. Overall, The Land Is Our Community is an absolute tour de force.