Abstract
Michael Soulé, co-founder of the Society for Conservation Biology and its first President, is widely considered to be the founder of conservation biology (Sanjayan, Crooks, and Mills 2000). In setting out his vision for the field, Soulé argued that it is a crisis-oriented discipline like cancer-biology, which, he suggested, implies that ethical norms are an inherent part of conservation biology. He stated that the ethical norms include value judgments such as the postulate that the "diversity of organisms is good" which "cannot be tested or proven" (Soulé 1985, 730). In coming to these views, Soulé cited several scholars who influenced him, including Aldo Leopold, an early-mid 20th century hunter, forester, wildlife manager, conservationist, and professor who has likewise been extremely influential in conservation biology and related fields. Indeed, many of the ideas that Soulé described have precedents in Leopold's thinking. Leopold famously stated that the land "has value in the philosophical sense" and that "an ethical relation to land" should have "a high regard for its value" (Leopold 1949, 223). Moreover, Leopold explicitly compared health in humans and health in the land, suggesting that the science of doctoring the land had not really begun yet (Leopold 1949). Meanwhile, the ecologist typically "lives alone in a war of wounds" as a "doctor who sees the marks of death in a community that believes itself well" (Leopold 1947). Given his foundational status and his explicit commitments to value-driven science, Leopold is a promising figure to examine in trying to understand the role of values in conservation biology. I argue that Leopold's scientific beliefs and value beliefs co-evolved over the course of his life. Values were present in the very building blocks of Leopold’s understanding of the environment. From his father Carl Leopold, Aldo learned to appreciate and enjoy the natural world; his father also impressed upon him a hunter’s ethics (Meine 2010, 18). By the end of his life, the hunter of prey and the eradicator of predators had become a defender of predators and other species as well as land communities as wholes. He groped toward understanding land health as the goal of a land ethic as well as the ecological mechanisms that underlaid it. This extends the picture of the relation of science and values described by Elizabeth Anderson (2004), which suggests that "if values can legitimately influence empirical theories, then empirical theories can legitimately influence our value judgments” (Anderson 2004, 2). According to Anderson, facts can count as evidence for value judgments, and value judgements can help us see certain facts. For Leopold, this bidirectional influence occurred over time, which, although perhaps not Soulé's "test" or "proof," arguably offered an informed living laboratory in which both his (sometimes entangled) science and values could advance. This examination of Leopold's trajectory will inform how we might think of the role of values in conservation biology as well as how we might think of the role of values in science more generally.
