To see how the adoption of any land ethics developed in the years following Leopold's essay, one can look to White Noise and its conversation between two professors as a means of understanding how the postmodern media and the ubiquity of news coverage has in fact created a kind of hyper-conservation, where everything visible, including the environment, becomes one more resource for the visual media machine. Jack Gladney, the main character of White Noise, has a conversation with his colleagues in which he asks "why is it […] that decent, well-meaning and responsible people find themselves intrigued by catastrophe when they see it on television?" (DeLilo 66)
Before examining how land ethics are dealt with in White Noise, it will be useful to explain the essentials of Leopold's theory. Leopold begins by making an analogy of ancient Greece, noting that "the ethical structure of that day covered wives, but had not yet been extended to human chattels," and that only "during the three thousand years which have since elapsed, ethical criteria have been extended to many fields of conduct, with corresponding shrinkages in those judged by expediency only" (Leopold 1949)