It will pay dividends to the present and future generations. It will make improvements in national and state domains which have been largely forgotten in the past few years of industrial development. Aldo Leopold has just published A Sand County Almanac, the book that will redefine how human beings relate to the land in the context of industralization. In addition to working hard to restore a piece of land that he inherited, Leopold's words will become some of the most influential environmental writing of the century. There is as yet no ethic dealing with man's relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it.
Land is still property.
The land-relation is still strictly economic, entailing privileges but not obligations. The extension of ethics to this third element in human environment is, if I read the evidence correctly, an evolutionary possibility and an ecological necessity. It is the third step in a sequence. The first two have already been taken. Individual thinkers since the days of Ezekiel and Isaiah have asserted that the despoliation of the land is not only inexpedient but wrong.