Beneath the Sand, The Land: Rethinking Biotic Citizenship With Aldo Leopold

• In Event: Crises of Liberalism: From Climate Change to Democratic Retrenchment

Abstract

In recent years, environmentalists on the political left have conflicted between a sometimes overdrawn but still real split between the advocates of an economic growth-dependent “Green New Deal” and ecologically-driven opponents of economic growth. In this paper, I attempt a rereading of the political lessons of Aldo Leopold against the backdrop of this schism with attention to the democratic context in which he developed his ‘Land Ethic’ leading up the posthumous publication of A Sand County Almanac in 1949. Against readings of Leopold which focus on the ethical to the exclusion of the political, I argue that his concept of ‘biotic citizenship’ is meant to transform our notion of political community. This can only be understood from within the social-democratic culture of 1930s and 1940s in the United States. Reading Leopold from within this context also helps to chart the racial and social limitations of his notion of citizenship, which reflects the contradictions of the New Deal coalition and bears on any attempt in Leftist environmental politics to find a rapprochement between the economic and the ecological in mapping a democratic path through the climate crisis. In sum, the paper offers a way that green futures may be judged according to a paradigm of ecological community and flourishing, which prioritizes democracy and the dismantling of consolidated economic power.

Author

• Kye Anderson Barker, Smith College