Ecology, Ethics, and Governmental Power
I recently finished reading Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. As I say in my notes about the book, I wish that I’d discovered this book long ago. But I didn’t say in those notes that as I read the book I found myself thinking again and again that there’s an analogy worth exploring between Leopold’s analysis of the proper relationship between humans and the rest of nature, and of how we have abused that relationship, on one hand, and how we should understand the relationship between one country and the larger international community, and of how the Trump administration is abusing that relationship, on the other. I’m still struggling with this, but — true to the title I’ve given my notes here — I want to think out loud about it.
Leopold argues that we humans should see ourselves as an integral part of nature rather than in opposition to it. He says that our health and ability to flourish depend on the health and flourishing of other parts of the natural world, even on those parts of the world that we think have no particular value. When we extract resources from the natural world without regard for what how these resources interact with nature more generally, we threaten the health of the natural world. This world has evolved over millennia, with complexities in relationships among organisms that are difficult to understand. By placing ourselves in opposition to it, we disrupt those relationships. In the short term, we might think that we do that to our benefit, but in the long term we find that we have changed the functioning of the world in a way that threatens our own survival.
As I read, I couldn’t stop thinking that this is how the Trump administration sees its relationship to other countries. It sees the United States as being in opposition to these other countries rather than as an integral part of the international community. Even if the policies of the current administration work to its benefit in the short term (and I would say that that is questionable), they damage the mutually supportive relationships that enhance our safety in the long term. By treating the resources of other countries merely as resources we need to extract for our own use, we will eventually discover that we have worked against our own interests. We need to learn the lesson that we are in mutual community, rather than in a random collection of relationships that we can manipulate at will.
Timothy Snyder offers a particular example of what such a lesson might offer, saying that the Trump/Vance approach to Canada, Denmark, and Greenland is both immoral and strategically disastrous. Joan Westenberg develops the contrast between soft power and brute force in order to make a similar point: Trump’s belligerent approach to other countries actually works against our long-term interests.
There’s definitely more to think about here. In particular, I think that many of the administration’s actions, intended to cement their authority within the United States, will in fact work to undermine the administration’s authority sooner or later.
In that light, I wasn’t all that surprised when I saw a similar analogy near the end of Leopold’s book:
In human history, we have learned (I hope) that the conqueror role is eventually self-defeating. Why? Because it is implicit in such a role that the conqueror knows, ex cathedra, just what makes the community clock tick, and just what and who is valuable, and what and who is worthless, in community life. It always turns out that he knows neither, and this is why his conquests eventually defeat themselves. In the biotic community, a parallel situation exists (pp. 204).
Leopold’s book was published in the late 1940s, so it seems likely that he had Hitler and Mussolini in mind. Perhaps he saw this as something like a warning to Stalin, who ruled Russia until his death in 1953. If so, I’d say, it was prescient, both for Stalin and for Putin. Regardless, the actions of the Trump administration make clear that Leopold’s hope was misplaced – this is a lesson that many of us have yet to learn. We can only hope that we will survive long enough to enjoy the benefits of such a lesson learned.