Narratives, Virtues, and Biodiversity: Perspectives from Leopold and Zhuangzi

Why does biodiversity matter, and what constitute ethical forms of engagement with diverse life on earth?  This research describes how two texts written more than two millennia apart – Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Almanac and the classical Chinese text, the Zhuangzi – use narratives to shed light on these questions. Both texts offer suggestive insights regarding the value of diverse forms of life, but more importantly, they describe virtues that can inform biodiversity research and conservation practice today.  The focus on virtues – as specific dispositions or ways of being in the world – draws attention to the ethos of biodiversity conservation: how humans approach and engage with plants, animals, and ecological systems more broadly.

In both Leopold and Zhuangzi, narratives help to articulate a set of relationally-oriented and contextually-sensitive virtues toward diverse forms of life. Leopold, for example, tells the story of the last grizzly bear in Escudilla in the American Southwest, describing how the bear’s killing reflects flawed conceptions of human progress.  Zhuangzi, whose text includes creatures ranging from fish to cicadas to birds, offers narratives that celebrate the diverse forms of embodiment that exist in the world.  His playful stories of giant gourds and gnarled trees challenge narrow human perspectives and invite the reader to consider broader possibilities.  Although they have distinctive approaches, Leopold and Zhuangzi both emphasize engagement, receptivity, perspective-taking, and the capacity to overcome preconceptions as critical in guiding human relations with diverse forms of life. These virtues are conveyed through narratives that engage readers both intellectually and emotionally, cultivating the habits of mind they enjoin.  For contemporary biodiversity conservation, these relational virtues carry two important implications: they support approaches that balance continuity and dynamism in an era of rapid environmental change, and they encourage continued, direct engagement with biodiversity, even as remote sensing and other technologies help to expand ecological knowledge.