Roberta L. Millstein (University of California, Davis)
I examine the use of "function" in ecologist Aldo Leopold's land ethic, invoked in two ways: 1) the healthy functioning of the land community, which is dependent on 2) the maintenance of the characteristic functions of populations that are parts of the land community. I argue that Leopold's second use of function, similar to what Dussault and Bouchard (2015) call "functional types", can be understood in terms of the selected effect account of function. I further argue that the performance of these functions under certain conditions maintain what Leopold took to be healthy functioning and persistence of a land community.
