Aldo Leopold says: “All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively the land.” We would also add that ensuring the voices of disenfranchised human communities are heard is long overdue. We are committed to social justice and decolonizing our communities and environmental decisions so that all human and non-human voices are heard and their needs considered.

It’s easy to feel powerless when considering the many environmental issues we face, but we all have a part to play as part of the larger, natural community. So whether it is helping clean up our shorelines, educating our youth, or taking more direct action we all play our parts. We accept the perspectives of others as they may disagree with our own and acknowledge and appreciate the opportunity to respectfully exchange ideas for potential growth and solutions.

We believe that community extends past the traditional definition to include the nonhuman world. Plants, animals, rocks, and minerals have an equal place within our community and we strive to educate humans on this definition of community so they may protect the nonhuman world. Additionally, we believe that the voices of those communities that have been affected most by environmental racism must be heard and acknowledged so that they may receive justice.  We start this work in our local communities as we believe there is work to be done in our own backyards.

We believe that we are all interdependent and interconnected with all living and nonliving things. We cannot continue to discuss and learn in silos, but remember that subjects are part of a whole. We cannot discuss environmental issues without also discussing the economy, politics, and other systems that directly affect the environment. The solutions we seek for change are found within understanding of how systems work and challenging our paradigms of how our systems are currently operating.

LNT is an essential element of our larger land ethic. We are committed to living lightly on the land, leaving the places we visit the same as or better than we found them. In some ways, minimizing our impact is easy to practice and can have a big impact. In other ways, we need to come together as a community to hold systems accountable for their impact on the environment and demand that they find less detrimental ways to operate. We all have a responsibility to consider our impact.

As a non-governmental organization we believe in collecting and reporting data in its truest form without influence. We work for the land and the water, not for a government or corporation. We use the data we collect to inform our stewardship and activism.