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22 Osgoode Hall L. J. 297 (1984)
Animal Liberation and Environmental Ethics: Bad Marriage, Quick Divorce

handle is hein.journals/ohlj22 and id is 307 raw text is: ANIMAL LIBERATION AND ENVIRONMENTAL ETHICS: BAD MARRIAGE, QUICK DIVORCE By MARK SAGOFF* I. The land ethic, Aldo Leopold wrote in A Sand County Alma- nac, simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively, the land.' What kind of community does Leopold refer to? He might mean a moral community, for example, a group of individuals who respect each other's right to treatment as equals or who regard one another's interests with equal respect and concern. He may also mean an ecological community, that is, a community tied together by biological relationships in interdepen- dent webs or systems of life.2 Let us suppose, for a moment, that Leopold has a moral commu- nity in mind; he would expand our moral boundaries to include not only human beings, but also soils, waters, plants and animals. Leopold's view, then, might not differ in principle from that of Christopher Stone, who has suggested that animals and even trees be given legal standing, so that their interests may be represented in court.3 Stone sees the ex- pansion of our moral consciousness in this way as part of a historical progress by which societies have recognized the equality of groups of oppressed people, notably blacks, women and children.4 Laurence Tribe eloquently makes the same point: What is crucial to recognize is that the human capacity for empathy and identifi- cation is not static; the very process of recognizing rights in those higher vertebrates with whom we can already empathize could well pave the way for still further extensions as we move upward along the spiral of moral evolution. It is not only the human liberation movements - involving first blacks, then D Copyright, 1984, Mark Sagoff. * Research Associate for the Center for Philosophy and Public Policy, University of Maryland. I Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949) at 204. 2 For discussion, see Heffernan, The Land Ethic: A Critical Appraisal (1982), 4 Envt'l Eth- ics 235. Heffernan notes that when Leopold talks of preserving the 'integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community' he is referring to preserving the characteristic structure of an ecosystem and its capacity to withstand change or stress. Id. at 237. ' Stone, Should Trees Have Standing? (1974). Id. at 44.

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