Deep Ecology

Image credit: https://sites.middlebury.edu/rethinking/about-this-site/deep-ecology/

Deep ecology is a philosophical movement that can be traced to a set of principles laid out by Arne Naess and George Sessions in the 1980s, though its roots extend earlier to the work Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, D.H. Lawrence, Robinson Jeffers, and Aldous Huxley. They summarize the movement by eight points as follows (maintaining their emphasis): 1. The well-being and flourishing of human and non-human life on Earth have value in themselves. These values are independent of the usefulness of the non-human world for human purposes. 2. Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realization of these values and are also values in themselves. 3. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs. 4. The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantially smaller human population. The flourishing of non-human life requires a smaller human population. 5. Present human interference with the non-human world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening. 6. Policies must therefore be changed. These policies affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures. The resulting state of affairs will be deeply different from the present. 7. The ideological change will be mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent value) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the differences between bigness and greatness. 8. Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation directly or indirectly to try to implement the necessary changes.

Deep ecology can be classified as an ecocentric philosophy, which stands in contrast to the standard environmental movement as an anthropocentric philosophy. This latter philosophy arose from the 1960s environmental movement that was a reaction to industrial pollution, making it more urban pollution-oriented and therefore centered on human wellbeing. Sierra Club founder David Browers was an ecocentrist and believed in the inherent value of nature. His successor, Michael Mcloskey, shared this view and worried that “the new environmentalism” looked upon the ecocentric view as “parochial and old fashioned”. This new, anthropocentric, view misses the critical role of diversity in complex nonlinear systems. In fact, it is common across many fields of study that I engage with myself to make simplifying linear assumptions and take an anthropocentric perspective that draws upon (if at times implicitly) capitalist economics and Western moral philosophy. As such, it does not surprise me that the environmental movement shifted in this direction over the 20th century.

On the third point above, Daniel Bell in ‘The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism’ distinguishes between “needs” as universal and “wants” as the idiosyncratic desires of individuals. Keynes draws a similar distinction between those needs that exist regardless of their impact on other people, which he argues are satiable, and those needs that “lift us above, make us feel superior to, our fellows”. He argues needs of the second kind may indeed by insatiable. In a similar way, Bell notes Thomas Aquinas argued that needs in the form of food, clothing, and shelter have limits (such as the space in your stomach) but the desire for money has no limit.

On the sixth point, it must be emphasized that they use the term ‘structures’ to mean a significant change that contrasts the incremental conservatism of current policy (by all nations). Considering the future from a deep ecology mindset requires an uncomfortable grappling with human population growth. Bigness, growth of consumption through more people and increasing per capita consumption, is not synonymous with greatness. A meaningful life arises from the enjoyment of inherent value, rather than the extractive value associated with human interference in the non-human world.

Naess provides some nice contrasts between shallow and deep ecology that illuminate the distinction from his perspective. In the case of pollution, a shallow approach focuses on technological solutions that purify the air, land, and water. Laws set limits on pollution and industries are off-shored to regions with more permissive regulations. In some sense, it is Tiebout sorting from the urban economics literature: households with children will move into towns with good schools and seniors will move to towns with no public schools. In the same way, industry sorts into the jurisdiction that provide the optimal policy mix for their needs. The shallow solution to acid rain (a pressing issue at the time of writing by Naess in the 1980s) is to avoid action and find flora species that are resilient to high acidity. In the deep approach, health is evaluated from the biospheric rather than human perspective and solutions are systematic. A deep approach would focus on the economic and technology conditions responsible for acid rain, then pursue long-term (greater than 100 year time horizon) impacts on all systems. Taking the example of resources, Naess argues that a shallow perspective views resources as belonging to those of the present generation with the capacity to exploit them. A deep perspective asks the question “how can resource use serve the quality of life rather the economic standard of living as generally promoted by consumerism”?

Beyond ecological diversity, Naess argues for cultural diversity that does not assume the hegemonic superiority of industrialized Western culture. Rather, it is an intrinsic good to maintain cultural diversity in the same way that maintaining biodiversity should be valued. The ecologist Thomas Crowther makes a similar argument for biodiversity in his advocacy for increasing tree populations, not simply in absolute terms but also by increasing species diversity. Continuing on the thread of superiority leading to unsustainable value systems, Paul Shepard charts the history of Western science focusing on the uniqueness of humans in their ability to form language, traditions, culture, love, and an inter-generational history conscience. Shepard interprets the view of the contemporay biologist Julian Huxley as emblematic of the overall field, when Huxley states that the purpose of the world was to produce humans as a species characterized by a social evolution that removes them from the strictures of biological evolution. Shepard argues that growing evidence of language and other traits previously thought uniquely human beg the question of whether it is moral for humans to place their welfare above that of nature. To Shepard, the ecological crisis is not a function of differences among humans by their trade but rather the intersection of personality and experience that shape our feelings towards other people and the Earth. Furthermore, he agues, the ‘search for identity’ is not only social by ecological in its origins. Lacking a sense of place and time, we are told that improvement of current social forms - rather than their replacement with new forms - is the solution to the societal malaise. Sessions continues this argument of cultural and ecological synergy through his statement that “The Scientific Revolution [overturned] the age-old organic view of the world as a living organism and replaced it with a mechanistic clockwork image of the world as a machine”.

To conclude with my own thoughts on the above matters, it can be challenging for the concrete-minded scientist to grapple with questions of philosophy and morality. For me, a starting point is to reflect on assumptions we take for granted as engineers. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is a hot topic at the University of Calgary as a solution to the climate crisis. How does this technology square with the principles of deep ecology? Is it solving a shallow or a deep problem? Does it center human well-being and the continuance of extractive patterns of consumption? I would argue, yes. My own research on electric vehicle adoption is founded on an assumption that switching one technology for another will address climate change, but what are the long-run implications of battery production? Rather than seeking technical solutions to accomodate continued population growth, we could address human population growth head-on. Urusula K. Le Guin’s “The Lathe of Heaven” provides an interesting study of our ability to address environmental damage through human action, including population control, and the human ‘God’ complex. I do not want to end on population control as the solution though. Therefore, I will leave things on this note: let us always be open to a different perspective, that we may be wrong or limited in our thinking, that we are just one resident occupying this planet and not a particularly long-lived one at that.

Note: An online search finds that the common criticism of deep ecology is its spiritual overtones; perhaps, we need more spirituality in our lives. But why give any credance to the muddled up opinions of an Agnostic married in a Catholic church who could spend the better part of the day reflecting on his time in Baptist youth groups being baffled by discussions about UFC fights mixed with discussions of Jesus telling a crowd to “turn the other cheek”. I wrote an essay in grade 12 English on what I viewed as the contradictions, or misweightings, of the contemporary evangelical Christian worldview that I believe remains among my best pieces of literary criticism. Maybe that ‘itch’ is why I started a blog documenting my thoughts on my readings after a decade-long hiatus from such writing.