Deep Ecology

11 Key excerpts on "Deep Ecology"

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  Engineers, Society, and Sustainability

  • Sarah Bell(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Springer

    (Publisher)

  Deep Ecology, social ecology and ecological feminism are three prominent schools of thought in environmental philosophy, politics and activism, each concerned with how to arrange societies in order to avoid human domination and destruction of nature. 3.2. Deep Ecology 37 3.2 Deep Ecology Deep ecologists hold that the anthropocentrism (human centred view) of dominant western value systems is at the root of the ecological crisis. They call for an ecocentric system of values and society that places ecological concerns at the heart of all human culture and politics. Since human systems are part of ecological systems, our primary concern should be the preservation and maintenance of nature. Moreover, an ecocentric world view values nature for its own sake, in contrast to an anthropocentric view which values nature only in terms of its use for humans. Non-human nature, particularly in wilderness areas, has a right to exist on its own terms, irrespective of potential economic or other value to humans. Deep Ecology is closely associated with wilderness preservation, is generally anti- industrialist and supports strict control of human populations. The term ‘Deep Ecology’ was first coined in 1972 in a paper by Norwegian philoso- pher Arne Naess (1995a). He contrasted ‘Deep Ecology,’ based on a deep questioning of human relationships to nature, to ‘shallow ecology’ which characterises more conventional scientific and reformist approaches. Shallow ecology is anthropocentric, focuses primarily on pollution and re- source depletion, and is ultimately concerned with the health and affluence of people in developed countries. Deep Ecology involves a deep questioning of the goals and viability of industrial society, focuses on the interconnectedness of all life, and aims at restructuring society to achieve greater local autonomy and decentralisation. Together with American George Sessions, Naess outlined an ‘8 point platform’ for Deep Ecology in 1984 (Naess and Sessions, 1995b).

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  The SAGE Handbook of Environment and Society

  • Jules Pretty, Andy Ball, Ted Benton, Julia Guivant, David R Lee, David Orr, Max Pfeffer, Professor Hugh Ward, Jules Pretty, Andy Ball, Ted Benton, Julia Guivant, David R Lee, David Orr, Max Pfeffer, Professor Hugh Ward(Authors)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  The details of this debate need not detain us, but during this episode and since a number of common criticisms of deep ecological/ecocentric philosophies and politics have emerged. These con-cern: the philosophical basis of Deep Ecology; the moral and political priorities of the movement; and the practical feasibility of its political programme. We will consider each of these in turn. Philosophy The deep ecological view of nature as a vastly complex network of relationships is open to some philosophical objections, and is also only doubt-fully consistent with deep ecological values. The ‘relational field image’ is introduced as an alterna-tive to the atomistic philosophy of classical mechanical science as well as individualistic social and political theories. Often the cosmology of modern physics and scientific ecology are cited as support for the relational view of the world (e.g. Capra, 1977). This can be justified to some extent, in that ecology, for example, does focus on the relationships between living organisms, either as individuals or as local populations, and the other organisms and non-living beings and condi-tions they interact with. However, this does not imply that everything ultimately resolves into relations. On the contrary, for the idea of relation-ships to make sense there have to be substantive things, beings, communities, etc., that are related. In other words, as well as relational properties, there must be some attributes that things have independently of the relationships they happen to have with other things. For example, being a stu-dent is a relational property of a person, because they can only be a student by virtue of belonging to an educational institution of some kind, or having a relationship with a particular body of knowledge or thought. However, to be a student also implies being a living person, having a certain set of mental abilities, a brain and central nervous system and so on.

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  Rethinking Green Politics

  Nature, Virtue and Progress

  • John Barry(Author)
  • 1998(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications Ltd

    (Publisher)

  At the same time agreement on the scientific nature of ecological problems can be useful in forging a politically workable normative agreement on social-environmental issues. The place of scientific knowledge within green moral and politica l theory will be further developed in the next chapter and Chapters 5 and 7. Al l I wish to note here is that a possible meta-physical basis for green political theory can be found within a secular scientific naturalism. In the end, for Deep Ecology, an 'ethical ' articulation of human relations to nature is in some way to admit falling short of being in harmony with it. An environmental ethic signifies a lack within human-nature relations of compassion, of sensitivity on behalf of humans. In this respect, the Deep Ecology critique of environmental ethics is similar to the communitarian critique of justice. From the communitarian posi-tion, the appeal to justice as the normative basis of social co-operation signifies a lack of solidarity and fellow-fee ling within society as a whole. On this account, justice is, at best, a 'remedial virtue' (Kymlicka, 1993). In a similar communitarian fashion, Deep Ecology criticizes environ-mental ethics on the grounds that it is an inferior or second-best normative basis for regulating social-environmenta l relations. This can be seen in Naess's comment that, 'We need not say today man's relation to the non-human world is immoral. It is enough to say that it lacks generosity, fortitude, and love' (in Fox, 1990: 221). It is for this reason that identification is so important within Deep Ecology since, as Naess again points out, 'there must be identification in order for there to be FROM Deep Ecology TO ECOLOGICAL VIRTUE 31 compassion [between humans and non-humans], and amongst humans, solidarity' (1995: 227). The ethical is unnecessary, and may indeed be unhelpful, while the political is something which can be derived from discovering our place in the sun and the order of nature.

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  Encyclopedia of Political Theory

  • Mark Bevir(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  The first wave of green political theory that followed from these early texts can be divided into its philosophical and political dimensions and, in terms of the latter, between those who sought to bolster the role of the state, at least in the short term, to deal with environmental problems and those who sought the deindustrialization of contemporary society and the decentralization of political power. Philosophically, there are two related areas of importance: metaphysics, on the one hand, and axiology, or value theory, on the other. Some green thinkers sought what they saw as fundamental metaphysical and axiological change, challenging the entire basis of the dominant tradition of Western political thought. This ambition is closely associated with Deep Ecology, a doctrine given its most explicit outline by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. For Naess, the deep/shallow ecology distinction tracked, roughly, the distinction noted above between ecological and environmental ends. Shallow ecologists seek piecemeal solutions to environmental problems and do not question the underlying economic and political order or the values on which that order is itself based. Deep Ecology, on the other hand, is held to be radical in the sense that it seeks to get to the roots of these environmental problems and treat their causes rather than just the symptoms. Deep ecologists seek to foster an ecological worldview in which human beings would see themselves as just one part of a web of life on Earth, through which any action on our part as human beings would have multiple, indeterminate, and unpredictable effects elsewhere. The warrant for this worldview was allegedly provided by the science of ecology, which deep ecologists took to overturn previously dominant Newtonian scientific frames, which saw matter as featureless and above all separable, for the purposes of analysis, into its smallest constituent components. The holistic science of ecology thus presented a fundamental challenge to the atomistic sciences, such as physics. As with many political theories, there was here an appeal to science to provide an empirical foundation for the underlying view of the world, and like many scientific perspectives employed in the political realm, it was a partial interpretation—of both ecology and Newtonian physics. As historians of scientific ecology have pointed out, there is a holistic strain to ecology, which, for example, sees ecosystems as having supervenient properties that are more than the sum of their parts, but there is also a more conventionally analytical scientific frame employed in ecology, and the latter is currently dominant.

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  Developing Ecofeminist Theory

  The Complexity of Difference

  • E. Cudworth(Author)
  • 2005(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Anthropocentrism: the human centering of the social Deep Ecology adopts a systemic approach to understanding the organi- zation and patterning of both social and “natural” life. From scientific ecology, Deep Ecology adopts the view that all processes are connected and human intervention in natural ecosystems cannot be without impact. Deep Ecology also adopts a philosophically holist position, which theorists such as Naess derive from Spinozist ethics. Spinoza suggested that “all” of nature, including inanimate objects such as rocks, should be seen as part of the cosmos, which collectively work to main- tain the integrity of the whole (Palmer 2001:49). Objects in what we would now call natural ecosystems are causally active and shape their environment, arguments that recall the systemic notion of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis (see Chapter 3). For Naess (1973), living beings of all kinds are “knots” in a biospherical net or field of “intrinsic rela- tions.” In this worldview, the net or web of relations is of paramount importance and the “system” as a whole cannot be reduced to its constitutive elements for as Robyn Eckersley puts it: the world is an intrinsically dynamic, interconnected web of rela- tions in which there are no absolute discrete entities and no absolute dividing lines between the living and the nonliving, the animate and inanimate, or the human and the non-human. (1992:49) Such nets or webs of relationships are incredibly complex and need to be conceptualized in terms of vast systems.

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  Green Politics

  Dictatorship or Democracy?

  • J. Radcliffe, Kenneth A. Loparo, Jo Campling(Authors)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  The approach should be one which was linked to an essential- ist perspective and a more metaphysical concept of the humanity/ nature relationship. Such a questioning of rationalism was also at the heart of one of the most influential positions, that of Deep Ecology. Deep ecologists and ecocentric ethics Arne Naess was the first author to make the distinction between deep and shallow ecology (1973, pp. 95–100). Various authors (Dryzek, Devall and Sessions) have identified two core characteristics of deep ecological or deep green thought. Firstly, that human self-realization can only truly come about through going beyond the self towards an identification with the whole of the natural world. Secondly, through this process there was a realization of a ‘biotic equality’ in which all species are equal with no hierarchy between species, including humanity. Eckersley argued strongly for this position to counter the idea that an ecocentric position was misanthropic. She argued that ecocentrics see The Need for an Environmental Ethic 71 each individual human and their culture as of value, provided their activity does not hinder the development of other non-human lives: Moreover, many critics of ecocentrism fail to realise that a perspec- tive that seeks emancipation writ large is one that necessarily sup- ports social justice in the human community. (1992, p. 56) Consequently, the idea was that through the establishment of such a consciousness there would be an end to speciesism and humanity would act in a way which was more naturally ecologically sound.

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  The Ecological Community

  • Roger S. Gottlieb(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  This paper holds both sides to be more wrong than right. Ecocentric ethics need not be as alien to liberal principles as they often seem. In fact, that liberal tradition beginning in the eighteenth-century Scottish Enlightenment is unusually hospitable to ecocentric insights. The work of David Hume and Adam Smith, and their contemporary heirs F. A. Hayek and Michael Polanyi, offers an important link between modern and ecocentric thought. Understanding this link offers an opportunity more deeply to ground the foundations of western modernity, and in doing so harmonize them with the world of nature.

  What is “Deep Ecology”?

  "Deep Ecology" is a term coined by Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. Its general perspective also applies to other environmental thinkers who broadly share Naess's view of humanity's proper relationship with the nonhuman world, although arriving there by different ways. Deep ecological perspectives have also been described variously as "biocentric," "eco centric," or "transpersonal." All contrast themselves to "anthropocentric" points of view.3

  "Anthropocentric," or human-centered, ethics argues that value in the natural world originates in the attitudes human beings take toward nature. Trees, waterfalls, and butterflies alike possess no moral standing beyond their capacity to serve human ends, or perhaps as repositories of values important to humans. In themselves, they have no meaning or ethically significant value.

  Most anthropocentric views regard the non human world in instrumental terms. Eugene Hargrove argues that this need not follow, and that deeming a belief anthropocentric simply "refers to a human-oriented perspective, seen from the standpoint of a human being."4

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  Environmental Crisis

  Understanding the Value of Nature

  • M. Rowlands, Kenneth A. Loparo, Jo Campling(Authors)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Against this reductionism, Deep Ecology advocates holism; the nature and behaviour of anything is bound up with its relations to nature as a whole, and is not amenable to reductive explanation in the manner Descartes thought. Descartes, as we have seen, is also a dualist; minds are essentially different kinds of things than bodies. The former Social Ecology, Deep Ecology and Ecofeminism 169 are non-physical, spiritual substances, the latter lumps of brute, unthinking, extended substance. Against this dualism, Deep Ecology posits monism, the unity of mind and nature, not in the sense that minds are reductively explicable as physical mechanisms, but in the sense that nature is also spiritual. The result is that nature is respiritual- ised and, hence, resacralised. The environmental problems we face today are, according to Deep Ecology, the result of the artificial separation of humans from nature. The key to rejecting this separation, hence rethinking our relationship to nature, lies in the identification of self with nature. This identifica- tion will underwrite a more harmonious relationship with nature, and the resulting resacralisation will underwrite a more respectful relation- ship. What, however, does it mean to identify oneself with nature? The notion of identification is, in fact, ambiguous. Following Val Plumwood, we can distinguish three different senses of identification employed by deep ecologists: indistinguishability, expansion and tran- scendence. 13 According to the indistinguishability construal of identifi- cation, there are no boundaries between self and nature. For example, Warwick Fox writes: 'We can make no firm ontological divide in the field of existence... there is no bifurcation in reality between the human and non-human realms... to the extent that we perceive boundaries, we fall short of deep ecological consciousness.' 14 Of course, this claim must be correct for the simple reason that it is trivial.

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  The Future of Environmental Criticism

  Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination

  • Lawrence Buell(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  “Nature is the lead-filled air breathed in by schoolchildren in toxic urban killing fields; nature is the pristine landscapes and watersheds that still survive in rural parks and wildlands” (M. Wallace 1997: 306). Given the dis-parity in what might legitimately be felt as “nature” or “environ-ment,” the divisions I have surveyed seem bound to persist for a long time to come, if not forever. This is a point worth special emphasis at the end of a chapter that has arranged its materials somewhat too neatly in order to make them manageable. My one-two-three series of Deep Ecology, ecofeminism, and environmental justice has relegated a number of significant ethico-political positions to the sidelines, most notably the discourses of animal and other nonhuman rights and a range of discourses of local–global interaction from liberal green reform to anticapitalist critiques of consumerism. I have simplified chrono-logically too, extracting a too-tidy narrative of “from (relatively) ecocentric to (more) sociocentric environmentalism” out of a messier and more pluriform critical scene. Deep Ecology has not in fact been displaced by ecofeminism or social ecology, nor has eco-justice revisionism displaced them, nor do any of these positions – important and representative though all three of them are – cover the whole range of environmental criticism. Furthermore, the way Ethics and Politics of Environmental Criticism 126 I have imagined ecojustice revisionism intertwining with prior ecocritical emphases outlined in the latter portion of this chapter is likely to be criticized by both sides, as being an attenuation of core environmental justice concerns and as restricting ecocriticism’s agenda overmuch to issues of social justice and equity. But these two pronouncements I do make with confidence.

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  An Introduction to Political Philosophy

  • Alexander Moseley(Author)
  • 2007(Publication Date)
  • Continuum

    (Publisher)

  As we have seen, the environmentalist inverts politics. Eco-politics should not involve the conception of society standing alone and independent of the environment, but should begin with fully recog-nizing man’s close connections to his natural state. Anything above and beyond the basic human drives is to be shunned or ignored in defining an eco-politics, for that is when the distortions of our values enter and we turn our back on the planet and its protective bio-sphere, viewing it, at worst, as something dispensable. Released from the strong tie to the soil and the natural cycle, the group is likely to magnify the myopia of the individual, permitting individual members to ignore e ff ects that they may have through AN INTRODUCTION TO POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY 148 free-riding on the assumed less destructive actions of others. The workings of the market – human interaction in production and exchange – may generate environmental costs that are not borne by the traders, and which, if unchecked, may slowly build up to cata-strophic levels. This is when politics, as it is traditionally understood as the employment of power for collective ends, may be harnessed to guide society in its choices and to enforce taxes upon producers and consumers that reflect the unseen costs of environmental damage. Not all environmentalists reject science and progress – some such as Passmore acknowledge that science and technology enable humanity to live an environmentally cleaner existence, and typically go on to demand that the state should encourage behaviour – pro-duction and consumption – that will support biodiversity or a reduc-tion in noxious gases and other e ffl uence. But then again, some misanthropic environmentalists cannot but see humanity as being the cause of all the earth’s problems (or at least those that can be directly traceable to human action) and argue that the planet would be better o ff without man.

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  Eco-Phenomenology

  Back to the Earth Itself

  • Charles S. Brown, Ted Toadvine, Charles S. Brown, Ted Toadvine(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • SUNY Press

    (Publisher)

  “Environmentalism” is a popular term for an inherently very diverse and fluid series of sociopolitical movements characterized by their con- cern for the “environment” and their willingness to take measures to address “environmental problems.” Environmentalism may be reformist or more radical. The former is anthropocentric and aims to ameliorate the environment primarily for the benefit of “anthropos” (“man”). To this end, “reform environmentalists” employ such measures as “resource management” (including “resource conservation”) or technological inno- vations, but see no need for a fundamental change in perspective or values. A more radical environmentalism is ecocentric and seeks to improve the life of planet Earth as a whole. Its adherents believe that “nature” is sentient and intrinsically valuable. They regard environmen- tal problems as the result of an androcentric, consumerist lifestyle, which 103 they reject. Instead, they seek to establish a way of living that is in har- mony with, and enhances, all forms of life. Responsive to the needs of nonhuman beings, they may work to restore habitats and native species, to support community gardens and organic growers, to stop genetic engi- neering and animal experimentation, to halt clear-cut logging, and to eliminate various sources of pollution. To counter consumerism, they practice some form of voluntary simplicity. They also attempt to integrate theory, experience, and practice. Among these more radical environmentalists there are those who realize that the dominant, destructive lifestyle is bound up with a pro- foundly flawed, dualistic ontology. Further, “eco-feminists” recognize that the traditional subjugation of women is connected with the domina- tion of “nature,” and that both spring from the same dualistic and hierar- chical ontology. Radical environmentalists emphasize the need for a thorough, ongoing, transdisciplinary questioning of ourselves and of our culture’s dominant worldview.

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