4 - Sunday, March 15, 1992 - North Shore News

Delving into the Deep Ecology movement

FOR THE record, it has been 20 years since Norwegian
philosopher Arne Naess presented his paper The Shallow
and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement to the
World Future Research Conference in Bucharest, coining

the term Deep Ecology.

Deep Ecology is still far, far
from being a mainstream senti-
ment, even in the environmental
movement, although Christopher
Manes claims in his book Green
Rage that some 16% of the Sierra
Club’s membership hold what are
basically Deep Ecology views.

That is, they believe that the
moral community recognized by
modern industrial civilization is
too narrow.

So long as power continues to
be centralized and nature viewed
as an accumulation of natural
resources, the lemming-like rush
into ecological oblivion cannot be
checked.

Without the plant and animal
communities being included in our
ethical system, there is no restraint
on the destruction of the natural
world. Thus, anthropocentrism
devours itself, along with
everything else.

If we conceive of the world
purely in terms of its usefulness to
our own species, in the end, when
the environment that sustains us is
thoroughly bunged, we'll be
finished too.

In a sense, the guerrilla war be-
ing fought today between loggers
and a handful of radical en-
vironmer.talists is a replay of the
famous /fionkey Trials, in which
the case for teaching evolution in
schools was so eloquently made by
Clarence Darrow.

Evolutionary theory shrinks our
role in the world from centrepiece
to current experiment.

If there is any face to divinity
over the 3% billion years of life
on Earth it is the biological
cauldron itself.

The timber industry would have
us believe that the forests are
Homo sapiens’ (or at least share-
holder Homo sapiens’) to be
clearcut simply because it can be
done and everybody wants to
make money.

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Here is where Deep Ecology
comes squarely into conflict with
the raison d’etre of almost all the
major religions, plus capitalism
and socialism, namely the Great
Chain of Being with Mankind at
the top, basking in God’s ra-
diance, or the wonderful world of
dialectical materialism, as the case
may be.

As fate would have it, the light
has turned out to be all too ra-
diant — ultraviolet rays breaking
through a decaying ozone layer.

The evidence of humanity’s su-
perior position in the heirarchy of
beings dissolves with it, for when
it comes to long-term viability as
a species, we are doing very nearly
everything wrong.

Eco-thinker Paul Shepard
probably phrased the essence of
Deep Ecology best when he stated:

“Ecological thinking ... requires
a kind of vision across bound-
aries. The epidermis of the skin is
ecologically like a pond surface or
a forest soil, not a shell so much
as a delicate interpenetration.

“‘It reveals the self ennobled
and extended rather than threat-

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a CHEVROLET GEO ou ra

ened as part of the landscape and
ecosystem because the beauty and
complexity of nature are con-
tinuous with ourselves.’’

Let’s face it. That’s a scary
idea, the notion that one is ‘‘con-
tinuous”’ with anything, let alone
anybody.

I don’: know about you, but !
have a perception of myself as a
creature alone in the world sur-
rounded by a lot of other
creatures who, even when I love
them, are still over there while I
am here.

Anybody talking about being
able to actually experience oneself
as a being that includes these
others and, indeed, somehow also
contains within itself the essence
of the entire planetary biosphere,
is clearly someone who has reach-
ed a level of evolution beyond my
own lowly state.

When a Deep Eco-type talks
about the need to get in touch
with one’s Ecological Self, and to
put the survival of the biosphere
ahead of one’s own immediate
human ass, what else can one do
but nod one’s head?

That’s the easy intellectual part.

When the argument is pushed to
its next logical stage, namely that
even one’s own children don’t

count as much as the welfare of
the planet, one quickly remembers
the reason Deep Ecology remains
on the fringe.

There isn’t much room for the
average parent in this collection of
thinkers. Saints excepted, the rest
of us will never be able to put
biosphere ahead of kids and loved
ones.

Yet through negligence and in-
action now, we in fact ARE
sacrificing our kids. To maintain
an incredible lifestyle today, we
are burning up the world of
tomorrow.

Nowhere do I see this paradox
better illustrated than when some-
body drives by in a car with a
sticker on the back saying BABY
ON BOARD, the main threat to
that baby iu fact being the carbon
from the exhaust pipe, bringing
on global warming to seriously
wreck the quality of his or her ex-
istence. What is the rush to get
the tot to such a future?

It may in fact be as simple as
simple-mindedness itself.

One philosopher — David
Ehrenfeld, author of The Arro-
gance of Humanisni — argues
that faith in hu:nan reason and its
ability to create a teciinological
society that continually improves,

making life easier and sweeter, is
naive.

If anything, the evidence sug-
gests that technology creates new
problems that have to be coped
with by more technology, and
sooner or later there must come a
reckoning.

The ‘‘unintended consequences’’
of progress just might be as in-
tegral as the promises, in which
case constant, futile innovation to
keep up with the side-effects of
our initial activity may be the best
we can hope for from technology.

If indeed such is the case, a phi-
losophy that pits itself squarely
against the supposedly
“‘enlightered”’ thinking that made
the Industrial Revolution possible
is both necessary and legitimate.
And that would be Deep Ecology
in essence. :

Twenty years after Arne Naess
unleashed his radical thought on
the world, there have been plenty
of skirmishes between people who
see nature as having a value
beyond the mere measure we place
upon it ourselves, and those who
take it for granted everything is
here for our benefit alone. But
just skirmishes. No main battle
yet.

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