Henry David Thoreau wrote that, “The earth I tread on is not a dead, inert mass. It is a body, has a spirit, is organic, and fluid to the influence of its spirit, and to whatever particle of that spirit is in me.”I This was a straight repudiation of Francis Bacon’s casting of the earth as an inert machine whose mysteries could be mastered by the human mind. And almost a century after Thoreau, Aldo Leopold, whose book A Sand County Almanac was the touchstone for a second wave of environmentalists, similarly called for an ethic that “enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils,
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