One of Aldo Leopold's most famous quotes comes out of his essay, The Land Ethic. It suggests that we should be concerned with more then the economic use of the land:

“The 'key-log' which must be moved to release the evolutionary process for an ethic is simply this: quit thinking about decent land-use as solely an economic problem. Examine each question in terms of what is ethically and esthetically right, as well as what is economically expedient. 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.

It of course goes without saying that economic feasibility limits the tether of what can or cannot be done for land. It always has and it always will. The fallacy the economic determinists have tied around our collective neck, and which we now need to cast off, is the belief that economics determines all land-use. This is simply not true. An innumerable host of actions and attitudes, comprising perhaps the bulk of all land relations, is determined by the land-users' tastes an predilections, rather than by his purse. The bulk of all land relations hinges on investments of time, forethought, skill and faith rather than on investments of cash. As a land-user thinketh, so is he. (A Sand County Almanac 262)” Leopold makes a strong argument there: land use is not only a question of economy but also of preserving the “integrity, stability, and beauty” of the biotic community. It also is a question of protecting the human spirit, by putting him in a natural environment that allows him to flourish. Both Bill McKibbean in Wandering Home and McDonough and Braungart in Cradle to Cradle explore this idea. A society that respects the natural world and views land use as more then economic is locally focused but always thinking about national problems at the same time. It realizes that we are a diverse society, and that our countryside is just as important as our cities. It also realizes the importance of wilderness, as we do not fully understand nature. Therefore human dominance is often futile and destructive. Wilderness exists both deep in our mountains and forests, and in our backyards. And finally, man must learn to be cautious about his use of technology and attempt to perceive it's side-effects whenever possible. Bill McKibbean in his hike from Bristol, Vt to Johnsburg, NY extensively explores what it means to be a person living in the southern Champlain Valley. He does not look at the standardized way of life that is common across the nation, but instead the localisms that makes life possible in this rural area. He looks at the small towns and tries to contrast what makes Vermont unique from New York (12; 17). He sees people adopting both the high-tech and the local to best exploit the land while respecting the local environment. McKibbean visits a variety of farms and wineries, where they grow things off the land. They are able to use the local to make products for both the local and tourist markets (34). He argues for local timber markets that help sustain local forest owners by keeping money and responsibility for good timber management local (33). Similarly, McDonough and Braunghart argue that embracing the local environment in design makes a lot of sense. One example they give is the saltbox house, that was common in New England in the nineteenth century. In these houses the fireplace is centrally located. Waste heat that normally would go up the chimney is radiated back into the house, heating higher floors of the house (129). This system not only uses a local source of fuel, but also attempts to capture as much of this energy by smart design. McDonough and Braughart also discuss local power generation from solar cells and micro-hydro, which in many parts of the country is a much more efficient and environmentally friendly way of generating power then large scale power distribution systems. In California with their tax incentives and ample sun, they note that it's even cost effective to install solar cells for local power (132). Green roofs that consist of local plants grown on the flat roofs, that are common on commercial buildings, are another alternative that McDonough and Braughart argue make sense in a lot of areas (82). It makes sense to pursue local solutions and to embrace local resources. The natural environment is already adept at dealing with the wastes of natural products from a region, assuming that human activity doesn't aggregate them together in levels that prove to be too toxic to be returned back to their original use. It also provides many resources that are overlooked. As McKibbean so pointedly notes on his hike, when he goes to visit the University of Vermont's Morgan Horse Farm that he's driven past it dozens of times in his car, but never visited it (54). This lack of perspective is why we so often overlook the many things that could be produced locally.

Another aspect of land use is the use of land in Rural America. As Bill McKibbean notes what happens in the city is deeply connected with what happens in the countryside (19). Farms still feed the cities. Rural land is increasingly used for dumping grounds for a variety of urban wastes, including new housing divisions. At the same time, McKibbean notes that people are becoming more aware of their footprint. Those who are the most connected to nature through management of it's resources are the most knowledgeable about the ecosystems they are effecting. One example he gives is the maple sap farm that he visits where he helps lay out the sap lines. The farmer knows many of the trees in the woods, as he sees them all the time and understands the complex interaction between them and his sap trees (22). He also discusses the Vermont Forest-owners Association, and how they are promoting locally grown forests, cut in sustainable ways. These private forest owners attempt to harvest their forests by minimizing the damage caused by logging trucks and only selectively harvesting trees (25). This has to be balanced against the economic and environmental realities that both Leopold and McKibbean both acknowledge. Some big logging companies and the forest managers they employee, have good records when it comes timber harvesting. Bill Smith, a personal friend and Ethan Allen Forest Manager for Southern New England holdings, once said: “the way you judge a logging job is by coming back in three years and seeing if there is more biodiversity then when you started out”. He goes on to point out that there is a difference between good logging and bad logging. Good timber harvesting is more a matter of skill and harvesting the right way, and not what company you happen to be working for when logging. Logging can be done while respecting the land and at the same time maximize their profit by ensuring the forests they own produce long into the future. McKibbean gives a similar example with farmers finding themselves having to use pesticides like Round-up, that while relatively environmentally benign, are still toxic chemicals that they are spreading on land that will be used for centuries into the future for farming (36). He also acknowledges that farmers are continuing to grow to stay afloat, even if he doesn't particularly understand some of the environmental and taste benefits of confined animals in dairying (20). Milk coming from cows whose feed ration is controlled is more consistent tasting and does not have the bitter taste associated with spring-feeding of cattle. Similarly, it's easier to control manure run-off from cows confined then it is with cows wading down near creeks and defecating around them. McDonough and Braunghart may argue that modern agriculture is contrary to principles of good land use (34), it still is a way of preserving land in a relatively natural state where many plants and animals can be sustained in addition to what farmers are trying to grow or raised. In contrast a residential subdivision or big box store parking lot does far less to preserve the integrity, diversity, or stability of an biotic community. Their suggestions that farming is little more then “artificially maintained [monoculture] system where... soil is depleted of nutrients and saturated with chemicals” (36), ignores the reality that most farmers rotate their crops and that chemicals are expensive to use and dispose of and therefore are avoided to the greatest extent possible. Animal manure is still a lot cheaper to apply to fields then anhydrous ammonia. Anti-agriculture attitudes only lead to more suburban sprawl and hatred of farmers, which perpetuates a decrease in environmental diversity. In contrast, supporting sensible agriculture subsidies that help small farms and encourage sensible environmental policies can do much more to protect environmental diversity. With ever advancing technologies such as biodiesel, safer pesticides, and even simple innovations like the rotational grazing that Michael Pollan argues for in The Omnivore's Dilemma, there is much the farm community to make itself even more green. Neither McDonough and Braunghart nor McKibbean mention the biggest threat to biodiversity: suburban subdivisions eating up more farmland and forest. Decrepit cities and the lack of urban renewal in our country is the greatest threat to biodiversity. McDonough and Braunghart note the difficulty of cleaning up brown fields compared to building housing and new factories on green fields, although they admit through more enlightened companies, like the Ford Motor Company, and more enlightened legislatures now starting to pay for brown field remediation (163). Downtowns are also being revitalized in ways that allow people to move back to the cities. As Aristotle once said, “Men come together in cities in order to live, but they remain together in order to live the good life.” By supporting the rebuilding of our cities, one can do much to protect biodiversity outside of them.

Not every acre of our land is cities or farmed by people. Much of the land area in this country is either wilderness or woods that are relatively untrammeled by man. This is a good thing, as man has a relatively poor understanding of how nature works. As McDonough and Braughart note, man engages in de-evolution or the “simplification on a mass scale” (119). Man is unable to fully understand how natural systems work nor are able to reproduce them exactly. Our farms and our cities are a crude reproduction of the natural world. While McDonough and Braughart would like us to engage in what they describe as “technical metabolism”, a system that constantly recycles man-made materials, it seems unlikely that will be able to reach that point any time in the future (110). Instead, we need to have a wilderness for both man and nature to escape the unexacting control of man. Our creations are great, most of them last for short periods of time compared to what nature can make, and are quickly destroyed by man and nature-made phenomenon. There are many plants and animals that are beneficial to man, but we are unable to fully understand their relevance. Wilderness provides for such an ecosystem to protect these plants and animals. We also need wilderness for solitude, as a place where humans can go to find their true selves. You can argue about the degree of wilderness needed to support those biotic communities, but it's clear we need it in one form or another. McKibbean adopts William Cronon's position that there is no place truly untouched man, and certainly all wilderness area has been touched by man in one form or another be it by acid rain or logging (95). Still, nobody is really claiming that wilderness is truly pure land. The federal wilderness statue defines wilderness as “untrammeled” land, which does not suggest untouched land, but instead suggests land that is not controlled by man. In other words, wilderness is designed to exist as a place where man is not actively trying to govern or limit it. Humans have changed the environment world-wide and continue to do as such, but there should be places that are not owned by man. Cronon is right insofar as wilderness in practice is areas designated as such by a legislature and kept off limits to all but foot-traffic, but the broader concept of land not dominated or controlled by man certainly exists. Yet, as McKibbean notes there is a lot of wilderness just outside out window be in a city or in a rural countryside (97). The world is natural, and there always will be animals and plants out there that we don't control. Ignore a piece of land for a couple of years, and it will quickly revert back to forest. Give it long enough, people will forget that any human even existed on a specific piece of land. We are seeing that across New York and Vermont as marginal farms revert back to forest. Foundations and stonewalls are all that are left to remind use of farms and towns that no longer exist. Wilderness is norm in our lives, and that is a good thing. Man can only subdue nature, he can not permanently control it forever.

A final question of the integrity of land is how we employee the use of technology to subdue it and get the human purpose accomplished. The goal of man should not be to subvert natural processes but instead to embrace them. As Leopold once argued, we have to be conscience of more then the economic virtue of land. McDonough and Braughart argue that we largely use utilize a cradle to grave or resource to waste system (27). They would prefer that we go to a system that is constantly reusing technical nutrients and biological nutrients (109). They advocate that natural products and man made chemicals be kept separate. As they note, all man-made chemicals if not made into another product will leach overtime into the environment in one way or another. We might be able to contain some waste products for short periods of time, but eventually they all will contaminate the environment (98). To make matters worst, we really do not know what goes in our products. They are hidden behind the vale of both trade secrets and ignorance (169). These arguments alone make a powerful case for a new kind of localism that suggested by Bill McKibbean and described previously. We are not going to get there overnight, but we can start to make that change through smart public policy choices that subsidize small producers and put a focus on the community over the nation. At the same time, we have to always be vigilant of the threat of our existing society. Particularly in a internationalized economy that emphasizes conformity over difference, we have to be concerned about the concentrations of certain chemicals that might be harmless in common levels but aggregated together may be having harmful effects on the environment. One example is antimony, a stabilizer used in PETE plastic is pretty safe except when concentrated together, where it can have properties similar to arsenic (106). McDounough and Braughart suggest that we try to create a list of truly bad substances or what they term an “X” list that must be phased out. These include things like “polyvinyl chloride, asbestos, benzene, chromium, antimony trioxide” (174). They suggest that we have list of recommended substances, which they term a “P” list that are generally safe or safer then then alternatives (175). Such as an ideal seems to make sense, though such a change is difficult and will take time along with significant pressure of government. Certainly we must control emissions from factories and large landfills that aggregate these chemicals closest together. Yet, bathing our cities and our countryside with lower-levels of these toxic chemicals isn't much of a solution either. We shouldn't be spreading death and destruction every time we start our car and truck's engines up, flush the toilet, spread fertilizer on fields, or take the trash out. As McDounough and Braughart note, while low-levels of exposure might not cause any immediate harm over time it can overload our bodies and cause cancer (69). To say nothing of what it is doing to our complex ecosystems that we barely understand.

Leopold was right in argue that there was a lot of value to land besides it's economic virtue. A vibrant biotic community ultimately makes land a lot more valuable and sustainable over time. It's not just a question of the human spirit though, as a healthy environment is necessary for us to profit and sustain that profit. We need to respect our local communities, and be active citizens. We need to realize that Rural America is an asset to our country whether we live in the big city or the countryside. We need to advocate for the protection of family farms and support local products and our local economy whenever possible and practical. We need to respect the wild and wilderness both in our backyard and those areas that protected and uncontrolled by humans. Wilderness is a place where the natural which don't really understand can exist with minimal human interference. We must advocate for the protection of certain special and unique areas who mystique would otherwise be forever gone. We simply do not know enough to be controlling all. Finally, we must also be vigilant about the many products we use and constantly be looking for alternatives that are a little bit less toxic. We might not able to do this just through our purchases, but we can do this by lobbying our officials to support scientific research and regulation of industrial products. Ultimately, we have to think about our actions as a society and try to find ways to best protect and respect our natural world.