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Deep Ecology

Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess coined the term deep ecology in the short essay “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement: A Summary” (1973). As the title of the paper suggests, this was at once a positive formulation of a new, deep ecology and a critique of what he disparagingly termed shallow ecology. These divergent “ecologies” were not divisions within scientific ecology, but branches of the environmental movement. Consumed with the search for piecemeal solutions to particular issues such as pollution and resource depletion, shallow ecology failed to ask deeper questions about the causes of ecological problems and therefore could never hope to solve the ecological crisis itself. Deep ecology, on the other hand, offered a wholesale normative critique of human society, and particularly the human relationship with nonhuman nature.

The bookends of Naess's philosophy of deep ecology are self-realization and ecocentrism. These two ideas are interrelated and arise out of the (scientific) ecological understanding of the living (and nonliving) world as comprised of interrelated, interdependent, and mutually constitutive beings. The philosophy of deep ecology is thus at once naturalistic in that it is derived from ecological science, and holistic as it appeals to the relationships between all beings, constituting a whole, living earth. Deep ecology offers a corrective against the (related) dominant Western, modern views that the human species is separate from nonhuman nature and that human individuals are in any sense separate from other living beings (other humans included). “Selfrealization,” for Naess, is the logical conclusion of any truly deep ecological questioning—when we realize the interconnectedness of all things, it becomes evident that any concept of the self must expand beyond the individual to include all things. Promoting Naess's ideal of self-realization, Fox states that:

When we realize we are related to the whole, alienation drops away and we identify more widely with the world of which we are a part. Another way of expressing this is to say that we realize a larger sense of self; our own unfolding becomes more bound up with the unfolding of other entities. So while deep ecology purports to offer a planetary-scale solution to the ecological crisis, the locus of normative change is the human individual.

Ecocentrism

Ecocentrism, the second key component of Naess's deep ecology, is a logical derivation of self-realization. Once an individual realizes that he or she is not a narrow, enclosed self and properly identifies with all of nature, anthropocentric (human-centered) thought or action becomes illogical.

Although Naess never writes in a polemical tone, the rhetoric of deep ecology is incontrovertibly divisive and dualistic. The most prominent example is the binary ecocentric/anthropocentric division, which maps directly onto the deep/shallow ecology division. Environmentally-sensitive individuals either possess deep ecological understanding or they do not; they either practice deep ecology or they do not.

Deep ecology was relatively unheard of in North America until 1985, with the publication of Devall's and Session's Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered, which presents a platform for the deep ecology movement. Unlike Naess's earlier work, the platform was intended to be less an ecophilosophy and more a set of principles that deep ecologists could rally around, regardless of philosophical or religious positions. The platform was based on the fundamental tenet that nature has “intrinsic value … independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.” Beyond this fiat of intrinsic value, which is basically a restatement of the deep ecology commitment to nonanthropocentrism, the platform called for a reduction in human population, a decrease in human interference in the natural world, a change in policies, and a personal “obligation directly or indirectly to try to implement the necessary changes.” So the deep ecology platform at once codified a new grounding for many American environmentalists (ecocentrism) and recalled resonant themes within the movement (overpopulation, leaving “nature” to its own devices, and direct political action).

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