PERSON
Aldo Leopold
The American forester and ecologist who enlarged the circle of ethics to include soils, waters, plants, and animals—and whose land ethic, keystone-species thinking, and injunction to “think like a mountain” provide the most precise available framework for diagnosing what AI is doing to the intelligence ecosystem.
Aldo Leopold is the ecologist of conscience—the man who watched a wolf die in the mountains of New Mexico and spent the rest of his life understanding what the green fire dying in her eyes was trying to tell him. Born in Burlington, Iowa, in 1887, trained at the Yale School of Forestry, he spent decades as a game manager and forester before the accumulated evidence of mismanaged landscapes converted him into something rarer: a scientist who changed his fundamental framework in response to what he observed. His posthumously published
A Sand County Almanac (1949) introduced
the land ethic—the enlargement of moral concern to include the entire
biotic community—and the principle that “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.” In the age of AI, the landscape that requires ethical enlargement is