October 21, 2023: Deep Ecology
Good afternoon. On several past occasions, I have referred to ecologism when discussing environmental thought. Today I would like to discuss ecologism and deep ecology in a more comprehensive and even-handed manner than I have in the past, even though I strongly disagree with most of the perspectives that are described below.
The term “deep ecology” was coined and described in a 1972 lecture by Arna Næss, entitled “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement”. As the title indicates, Næss distinguishes between “deep” and “shallow” ecology as follows. Shallow ecology, which Næss asserts is the majority of the environmental movement, believes in environmental protection for the fulfillment of human needs. Pollution harms people, and therefore it should be curtailed. Few people would disagree with this statement in principle. Deep ecology, by contrast, is the belief in environmental protection for the sake of nature itself. Deep ecology espouses ecocentric or biocentric values, as opposed to the anthropocentric value system that characterizes shallow ecology.
Like all ideas, deep ecology is based on other ideas that can be traced back to the limits of historians’ sleuthing abilities. I’ll just mention two. First is Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac, published posthumously in 1949 and became a leading conservation text. A Sand County Almanac defined the “land ethic”, or the idea that there is a moral responsibility to care for the land. A clear formulation of ecocentric ethics, Leopold states,
A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
The second is the conservation ethic of John Muir. A Scottish-born American, Muir is known for his integral role in establishing the national park system, opposition to the Hetch Hetchy Dam, and founding of the Sierra Club. In the development of the park system, Muir and Gifford Pinchot famously (though perhaps exaggeratedly) clashed over the ultimate purpose of the parks. Pinchot took what future generations might call an anthropocentric view and argued that the purpose of conservation was to preserve resources for the benefit of future generations. Muir took what could be called a more ecocentric view, appreciating the transcendental character of the landscape, and saying,
Dam Hetch Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the people's cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has ever been consecrated by the hearts of man.
Now let’s consider George Sessions’ 2014 essay, “Deep Ecology, New Conservation, and the Anthropocene Worldview”. Sessions considers the 1960s to be the foundational decade for modern environmentalism, and regards as the three most important figures as Rachel Carson, David Brower, and Paul Ehrlich. Rachel Carson was a marine biologist and conservation who is best known for Silent Spring in 1962, a book that popularized concerns about synthetic pesticides, particularly DDT, and was perhaps the most important work in bringing environmental politics to the mainstream. David Brower was a director of the Sierra Club, founder of Friends of the Earth, and cofounder of the League of Conservation Voters, among other environmental activities, and he did much to establish the movement’s opposition to nuclear power. Paul Ehrlich is best known for advocacy of population control, especially in The Population Bomb in 1968.
By 2014, different approaches such as “bright green environmentalism”, which openly embrace humanism and takes a more sympathetic view to technology and economic growth, were gaining more traction. Sessions was having none of it, and he responds with a passage that cannot be characterized but as scientism (bold added by me).
And by refusing to accept the all-encompassing ecological worldview and social changes required, don’t Bright Greens fail to face the ecological realities the world scientists have increasingly tried to warn us about?
Sessions does not shy away from anthopocentric framings when it suits him. For example, he discusses E.O. Wilson’s biophilia hypothesis, which holds that humans have an innate urge to connect with other forms of life, and argues that a healthy environment and natural connections are important for mental health. At the end of the essay, Sessions writes (bold again added by me),
Concentrating, as we now are, primarily on lowering carbon emissions to counter climate change is absolutely crucial but a gross oversimplification of the problem. We have to see the “big ecological picture” and work on all the key problems involving a major change in the direction of civilization. But some environmentalists are now claiming that we have waited too long and it is already too late. Oh no! Here comes the “doom and gloom” again. I personally think that as responsible human beings we should do everything in our power to turn things around and save ourselves, the ecological integrity of the Earth, and other species. But to what extent have most people lost the capacity to “seek the truth,” face reality, and “do the right thing?”
Sessions does not hide that he has an axe to grind.
Another key concept is “holism”. Mick Smith, quoting Alan Drengson, defines,
Ecology in this sense is not a reductionist undertaking, but a movement toward a more whole (or holistic) vision and understanding of world processes. Deep ecology seeks to look into all levels of existence.
A technical, reductive approach might try to break down environmental challenges into discrete, solvable pieces. For example, climate change looks like a difficult problem from a distance, but up close a range of solutions emerge, including clean energy deployment, efficiency, adaption, geoengineering, etc. Smith, as well as Sessions in the above passage, would reject this approach, arguing that no such strategy really solves the problem because the underlying problem is with industrial civilization and capitalism itself, and so any attempt to solve a problem without addressing the root cause will merely exacerbate another problem elsewhere. A range of environmental problems, including climate change, desertification, plastic pollution, and so forth are considered together as “the ecological crisis”. Or if we want to generalize beyond traditionally environmental topics, we have the trendy term “polycrisis”.
A next important concept is decentralization. In both the essays by Næss and by Sessions, the idea that a decentralized society is preferable to a centralized society is so axiomatic that the idea is posited with little explanation. Næss argues,
The vulnerability of a form of life is roughly proportional to the weight of influences from afar, from outside the local region in which that form has obtained an ecological equilibrium. This lends support to our efforts to strengthen local self-government and material and mental self-sufficiency.
I will confess that I don’t fully understand why this idea is so central to deep ecology, but it clearly is. E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful expounds in depth. Gary Snyder, known for this work on bioregionalism, said,
Bioregional awareness teaches us in specific ways. It is not enough to just ‘love nature’ or to want to ‘be in harmony with Gaia.’ Our relation to the natural world takes place in a place, and it must be grounded in information and experience.
The thinker Lewis Mumford pushed back on the “technology is neutral” concept, instead advancing the notion of “technics”, which encompass not just the technological aspect but also the social and cultural aspects. He distinguishes between democratic technics and authoritarian technics. A small-scale system might (though not necessary is) democratic, while a large-scale system is necessarily authoritarian. Since nuclear power requires a large-scale industrial base, it is necessarily an authoritarian technology.
Murray Bookchin argued that deep ecology is a misanthropic ideology, and while this is clearly meant to be an insult, David Ehrenfeld comes close to confirming the stereotype in The Arrogance of Humanism (synopsis here). Ehrenfeld expresses deep skepticism about the notion that human well-being should be regarded as of supreme ethical importance and about the capacity for human reasoning and technology to solve problems. Quoting Herman Daly, Ehrenfeld writes,
The world’s economy is a wholly owned subsidiary of the world’s ecology and not the other way around.
I tried to draft a formulation as to what deep ecology mysticism might look like, but it is not well-defined enough to do. Nevertheless, Lynn White threw down the gauntlet in The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis, wherein he argues that Christianity is to blame for advancing an anthropocentric ethic, underpinning environmental problems. Other authors have argued that White is wrong in his understanding of Christianity, and this is especially puzzling when considering that White was a practicing Christian.
As noted above, John Muir and Arne Næss both express their views of nature in theological terms, though not in ways that are easily definable. Næss attempted to systemize his thoughts as a philosophy called Ecosophy T. Joanna Macy has attempted to infuse a Buddhist spirituality in deep ecology. Fritjof Capra has attempted to integrate deep ecology with quantum mysticism. Earier, Alfred North Whitehead proposed a panpsychist worldview which is of great interest to deep ecologists. Deep ecologists have been interested in a mystical interpretation of the Gaia Hypothesis for ecology, though James Lovelock himself, the originator of the hypothesis, was not interested in such a thing.
Meanwhile, George Sessions in the essay mentioned above writes disapprovingly of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Buckminister Fuller, two other figures influential in countercultural thought, and in particular of Fuller’s “spaceship Earth” metaphor.
Finally, the belief in the need to reduce human population, as well as to reverse economic growth, is an obsession that runs through deep ecologic thought. Of the three main figures that Sessions cites, Ehrlich’s population control advocacy is well known. David Brower regarded population growth and immigration as great environmental evils whose curtailment was a top priority. It is hard for a person today to understand how central population anxiety was to the environmental movement of the 1960s; I don’t think it would be an exaggeration to call it the central concern. As explained by Sessions, Lewis Mumford, Gary Snyder, and David Ehrenfeld all devoted substantial efforts to arguing against economic growth, and degrowth remains a central part of ecologic politics.
Barry Commoner’s Four Laws of Ecology offer a succinct illustration of principles.
Everything is connected to everything else,
Everything must go somewhere,
Nature knows best, and
Nothing comes from nothing.
To sum this all up, I would consider the following to be defining beliefs of deep ecology, which most adherents of the movement would agree to.
Ecocentrism (valuation of ecosystems), rather than anthopocentrism (valuation of humans), is the proper basis of ethics.
Holism or holistic thinking: the functioning of ecosystems and environmental challenges must be understood as a whole and cannot be properly understood by breaking them into components.
Small-scale modes of production, such as in bioregionalism, is preferred over large-scale production.
Human connection with nature is essential.
Reduction of human population and economic activity are high environmental priorities.
There is interest in developing a spiritual basis for ecological values, and Christianity does not provide such a basis.
While deep ecology is not entirely devoid of value, I would regard it as a pseudoscientific idea that cannot serve as the basis for effective or ethical policy. There are many ecocentric ideologies that are far more constructive.
Quick Hits
My proofreading is not the best, but I am particularly embarrassed to have put the wrong dates in the title for the last two posts. My apologies for that. They were written and sent on October 7 and October 14 respectively, not October 10 and October 17.
Noah Smith writes about the faltering of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, an ambitious project to develop infrastructure around the world that was announced in 2013.
Donald Trump announced his intention to ban refugees from Gaza from the United States in response to this month’s war. There is little security justification for such a ban, and a person can take a position that is sympathetic to Israel’s security needs without devolving into Islamophobia. People who know my own situation will know that my strong disapproval of the behavior of the Russian government obviously does not translate into hatred of the Russian people. The Muslim ban has also served as a substitute for serious ideas for dealing with foreign policy crises.
Thailand faces a serious population aging challenge which threatens what has been rapid economic growth in recent years. On the other hand, China, which has an even more serious demographic challenge, posted a third quarter GDP growth rate of 4.9%, better than expected.
On October 17, there was an explosion at the al-Ahli Arab hospital in Gaza. Initial reports blamed this explosion on an Israeli airstrike, but later reports suggest that the cause may have been a misfired rocket from Palestinian Islamic Jihad, one of the militant groups involved in the war. I don’t think the matter has been conclusively settled, but I would lean to the latter interpretation. Especially in a war, initial reports of events are often not accurate, and it is important to be careful of what has been confirmed and what comes from a reliable source.
Mark Andreessen wrote “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto”, which even among the techno-optimism-leaning crowd that I follow has been widely panned. Andreessen earlier wrote “It’s Time to Build”, which was followed not long after by opposition to multifamily housing in Atherton, California. I am not (only) pointing this out to take a cheap shot against Andreessen. These kinds of airy manifestos mean little until they confront real life situations, and given that “It’s Time to Build” failed miserably, it now appears to be nothing more than empty rhetoric. My impression of his new manifesto is the same, and there would be little point in dissecting it and saying what is good and what is not.
This week, President Biden made what I thought was a good speech calling for military aid for Ukraine and Israel. In that speech, Biden referred to a recent major infrastructure plan that would link India, Arab countries, and Europe through rail and shipping projects. Biden is using these kinds of projects as a diplomatic tool, and it can be seen as a response to the Belt and Road Initiative. However, as I argued earlier, there are reasons to be wary of embracing the US-India relationship too closely, and I can (and maybe will) write similar things about Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries.
I recently learned the term “Frutiger Aero”, which was coined in 2017 by Sofi Lee of the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute and become popular in 2022. It refers to a design aesthetic that was common in the technology industry from 2004-2013, following the Y2K style and giving way to the flatter, more abstract design motifs of recent years. Given a 20 year nostalgia cycle, it would seem that the spike in interest in Frutiger Aero is right on cue. This would be a fun main blog topic some time.