Deep Ecology

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Deep Ecology

Deep ecology is a new religious movement that believes Western civilization's anthropocentric (humancentered) religion and philosophy is the root cause of a currently unfolding ecological catastrophe. Deep ecologists believe that for humans to live harmoniously with nature they must reject anthropocentric worldviews and resacralize their perceptions of nature as sacred, thus recognizing that nature has intrinsic value (value apart from its usefulness to humans). In the late twentieth century, pagans accurately viewed deep ecology as a kindred form of nature religion.

Deep ecology has greatly influenced grassroots environmentalism, especially in Europe, North America, and Australia. Interest in the movement has spread through road shows and ritual enactments led by touring movement advocates, through the writings of its architects (often reaching college students in environmental studies courses), and perhaps especially through the dramatic activism of the vanguard radical environmental movement Earth First! Participants in this movement probably number in the low tens of thousands.

Arne Naess, a Norwegian philosopher and mountain climber, coined the term deep ecology during a 1972 conference in Bucharest, Hungary, and soon afterward in print. He argued that nature has intrinsic value and criticized "shallow" nature philosophies that only value nature instrumentally.

Naess insisted that there are plural paths to a deep ecological perspective. Indeed, a wide range of religious perspectives, especially indigenous religions (i.e., Native American religions), Buddhism, Taoism, and neopaganism, have influenced those drawn to deep ecology. It is, however, the personal experiences of a spiritual connection with nature and related perceptions of nature's sacredness that ground deep ecological commitments; a secular rationale is almost wholly absent.

Naess's own path to deep ecology began with a mountain-oriented nature mysticism that convinced him of the sacred interrelatedness of all life. He subsequently found in Baruch Spinoza's pantheism and Mahatma Gandhi's notion of self-realization the key ideas upon which he would build his environmental philosophy.

Although Naess coined the umbrella term now used for most nonanthropocentric environmental ethics, many other individuals were contemporaneously criticizing anthropocentrism and developing the new movement's ideas. One crucial event early in deep ecology's evolution was the 1974 Rights of Non-Human Nature conference held at a college in Claremont, California. Inspired by Christopher Stone's influential 1972 law article (and 1974 book), "Should Trees Have Standing: Toward Legal Rights for Natural Objects," the conference attracted many of those who would become the intellectual architects of deep ecology. These included George Sessions, who, like Naess, drew on Spinoza's pantheism and who later coauthored Deep Ecology with Bill Devall (1985); the poet Gary Snyder, who in 1969 published Turtle Island, asserting the value of place-based spiritualities, indigenous cultures, and animistic perceptions, ideas that would become central to bioregional deep ecology; and Paul Shephard, who argued that people in the world's remnant foraging societies were ecologically superior and emotionally healthier than those living in agricultural societies. Shephard thereby provided radical greens with a cosmogony that explained humanity's fall from a pristine nature paradise.

By the early 1970s, these early architects of deep ecology and the thinkers they drew upon had put in place the central ideas of the deep ecological world-view. Soon additional works, some penned by early participants in Earth First!, such as the movement's cofounder Dave Foreman, Bill Devall, and Christopher Manes were added to the mix. Later works expanded and reinforced the cultural critiques and spirituality of deep ecology. Especially influential were those by Dolores LaChapelle, John Seed, Joanna Macy, Arne Naess, Warwick Fox, George Sessions, David Abram, and Freeman House.

Since the mid 1980s, deep ecology increasingly has shared ideas, myths, rituals, and personnel with pagan and bioregional groups. (Bioregionalism shares a spiritual affinity with paganism and deep ecology, but its emphasis on developing sustainable lifestyles and redrawing political boundaries to reflect the contours of differing ecosystem types gives it a distinctive name and identity.) The connections among these groups have deepened the pagan and countercultural character of the deep ecology movement. Despite its environmental apocalypticism, deep ecology entered a period of institutionalization, establishing a variety of institutes and organizations to promote its objectives. Indeed, it is its expectation of a biological meltdown that gave the movement its urgent passion to promote Earth's spirituality, a sustainable society, and environmental activism.