Leopold marked American resource consumption as an imperial, transnational harm

Evidence

The opening volume of Cities of Salt spans the period from 1933 to 1953, the very era when Aldo Leopold was enunciating his land ethic, advocating a far-sighted vision of what it means to live responsibly and viably in environmental time. Leopold’s ethic was circumscribed, in some ways, by the particularities of America’s Jeffersonian traditions; he did foresee, however, that to live as an American in the American century was to be a consumer of historically calamitous proportions. He foresaw, too, how the impact of such unchecked resource consumption would be felt disproportionately abroad. In 1932, one year before an American petroleum corporation signed the first concession agreement in the Persian Gulf, Leopold wrote: “When I submit these thoughts to a printing press, I am helping to drain a marsh for cows to graze, and to exterminate the birds of Brazil. When I go birding in my Ford, I am devastating an oil field, and re-electing an imperialist to get me rubber.” — Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism…, 200

Categorization

• XREF: Leopold’s land ethic — that local acts ripple into distant extraction — connects to Soundscape’s local noise exposure registering distant chronic harms, and to the settler-colonial land strand of the Eco-Justice polyad. — connects to: English conservation policy exported environmental destruction to the American colonies — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology,…, 886; Imperial imposition caused transnational migratory upheaval and oppositional formations — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims: Race and Labor in…, 819
• ADDENDUM: Leopold seeing consumption as ‘draining a marsh for cows’ and ‘exterminating birds of Brazil’ extends the trees-as-infrastructure logic: the consumer’s everyday act is felt as slow violence at the distant extraction site.

Broader Connections

• English conservation policy exported environmental destruction to the American colonies #corroborates (0.75) — Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature, 886
• Imperial imposition caused transnational migratory upheaval and oppositional formations #complicates (0.70) — Junaid Rana, Terrifying Muslims, 819