Integrity, Sustainability, Biodiversity and Forestry

According to Leopold (1949), “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.” Leopold’s list of desirable ecosystem attributes has undergone various additions and subtractions. Rodman (1983) added diversity, complexity, harmony, and scarcity, to this multifaceted norm, but removed the notion of beauty—perhaps because he thought that it existed more in the eye of the beholder than in nature itself. Contemporary ecologists raise questions about whether stability is a necessary feature of natural ecosystems, given their dynamical character. For example the fire ecology and disease patterns of most boreal forests in Canada have the result that virtually no forest stands reach 200 years of age without a natural catastrophic destruction. On the other hand, biological diversity and the sustainability of humanly exploited ecosystems are norms that are more recently in focus. Suppose, now, we omit mention of all of the qualities of the biotic community except integrity; will we then have a sufficient principle to guide our conduct affecting ecosystems or nature at large? Can we dispense with the other qualities proposed by Leopold, Rodman, sustainable development theory and others as redundant additions to the norm of integrity?