People and their societies, have a complicated relationship with land. The unofficial patron saint of ecologists, Aldo Leopold, in “The Sand County Almanac,” traced the modern human relationship with land from a purely economic to an ecologically based approach, culminating in his “ Land Ethic.”  In this ground-breaking and influential essay, Leopold proposed that “a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it.”  The main idea embodied in this essay was that good land management was an individual and community responsibility that transcended pure economics.  While Leopold focused primarily on the cooperative nature of the human relationship to land, a secondary, but just as important, part of the essay was that “The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants and animals, or collectively, the land."