Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethics in Paul Seed’s Dead Ahead: The Exxon Valdez Disaster

“The Land Ethics” is taken from a part from A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold. It articulates a philosophy that reveres nature and grants it moral status as a part of the community. Leopold argued that humans should conceive their relationships with nature differently. On seeing this fact, ethics focused on humans and property, he urged us to enlarge the community to “include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” The land, then should be preserved and protected. Doing so is right. Not doing so is wrong. “Aldo Leopold says, a land ethic, then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of the land” (Leopold). Aldo Leopold work brought forth the idea of ecology and revolutionized natural resources management. He passionately introduced a land ethic, a way of seeing our actions on the landscape through a moral lens. Using this ethic, he helped drive consideration of human actions in a more complete and thoughtful manner that effectively valued ecological function rather than simply justifying all action based on human desires. Paul Seed’s Dead Ahead: The Exxon Valdez Disaster is based on real life incident. This movie was released on December 12, 1992 in USA, directed by Paul Seed, produced by John Smithson and David M. Thompson, and distributed by HBO channel. Exxon Valdez oil spilt, the tanker left Alaska on March 23, 1989, at 9:12 p.m. carrying more than 53 million gallons of oil. Just three hours later, after the ship ran into a reef, thousands of gallons of oil spilt in the sea. The sum of oil spilled was sufficient to fill an Olympic-sized swimming pool (see. fig. 1). It is the worst environmental disaster in history. “As a result,