Unlike the other contributors to this volume, Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) was not a philosopher. He was a forester and a man far ahead of his time, and his prose flows as smoothly and clearly as a stream. As early as the mid-forties, Leopold was defending a radical environmental ethic. In this prescient excerpt from his posthumously published Sand County Almanac, Leopold insists that an environmental ethic cannot be couched in economic or utilitarian terms, à la the need to protect the land for the sake of our grandchildren. On Leopold’s account, if the well-being of our heirs is our main concern, then we will always be open to cutting corners on the environment. To listen to Leopold tell it, a green ethic has to be one in which we value the “biotic community” for its own sake rather than as a means to something else, such as human happiness. As the avid hunter and outdoorsman succinctly puts it, “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.”