<]>> The environmental movement has traveled a long way since those early Earth Day festivals when millions of school kids were ritualistically mobilized to clean up streets, while Arthur Godfrey, Barry Commoner, Paul Ehrlich, and a bouquet of manipulative legislators scolded their parents for littering the landscape with cans, newspapers, and bottles. Yet the entire society was structured around the oppression of millions of serfs and opulent nobles, a caste system so fixed, exploitative, and deadening to the human spirit that one wonders how notions of spirituality can be given priority over the need for a critical evaluation of society and the need to restructure it. Thus a repellent reactionary like Thomas Malthus and the neo-Malthusian tradition he spawned is celebrated with the same enthusiasm in Deep Ecology as Henry Thoreau, a radical libertarian who fostered a highly humanistic tradition. of such interference [!]" Along with this movement, came the emergence of a conflicting ideal, called Social Ecology, which centralized around the importance of … %%EOF The kind of "ecological" thinking that enters into the book seems to surface in an appendix called "Ecosophy T" by Arne Naess, who regales us with flow diagrams and corporate-type tables of organization that have more in common with logical positivist forms of exposition (Naess, in fact, was an acolyte of this repellent school of thought for years) than anything that could be truly called organic philosophy. At which point God's gift to misanthropy, David Ehrenfeld, cutely observes that the smallpox virus is an "endangered species" in his The Arrogance of Humanism, a work that is so selective and tendentious in its use of quotations that it should validly be renamed "The Arrogance of Ignorance." That a cosmic "Self" is created that is capitalized should not deceive us into believing that it has any more reality than an equally cosmic "Humanity." Note well that neither Naess, Sessions, nor Devall has written a single line about decentralization, a nonhierarchical society, democracy, small-scale communities, local autonomy, mutual aid, communalism, and tolerance that was not worked out in painstaking detail and brilliantly contextualized into a unified and coherent outlook by Peter Kropotkin a century ago and his admirers from the 1930s to the 1960s in our own time. This kind of "critical" stance is easy to adopt; it can even find a place in People magazine. For example, the abstract connections to the environment discussed by Naess in his essay ecosophy T aren’t included in the eight basic principles of deep ecology as listed in Devall and Sessions. }���T�\����`4��G�$|؛�?w]�벨��s�լ%,��64���#9�*��,_z |���R�JnrhN:"��e��)f�42'���W��P;X4l�� ��+ҿJ�ʋ����+j������Z��p����.U|�=q �OSӂr��d�C�_���U֍C���5�I]��@�Rb�ދFrE���j�4v;O�|�DF}������;D�E�,�18|P �T�:��6*B��hEI2��2��٢v��xdJ�]��&c. Thus the ecological crisis is rooted in a class-based, hierarchical, patriarchical society. Weston writes about shallow ecology, his main… It is not from an excess of selfhood that we are suffering but of selfishness---the surrender of personality to the security afforded by corporations, centralized government, and the military. 0000005200 00000 n Social ecology is based on the conviction that nearly all of our present ecological problems originate in deep-seated social problems. Is there perhaps a deeper ecology than deep ecology? Deep ecology proposes an embracing of ecological ideas and environmental ethics (that is, proposals about how humans should relate to nature). The book has to be read to understand the reactionary implications of deep ecology's demographic positions. 76 Two excellent essays from an ecocentric perspective which probe these matters more deeply than the usual deep ecological discussions are Neil Evernden, “Ecology in Conservation and Conversation” and Zimmerman , Michael E. It does not try to regale metaphorical forms of spiritual mechanism and crude biologism with Taoist, Buddhist, Christian, or shamanistic Eco-la-la. 0000212589 00000 n The fact is that human communities are consciously formed communities---that is to say, societies with an enormous variety of institutions, cultures that can be handed down from generation to generation, lifeways that can be radically changed for the better or worse, technologies that can be redesigned, innovated, or abandoned, and social, gender, ethnic, and hierarchical distinctions that can be vastly altered according to changes in consciousness and historical development. measures" that Devall and Sessions belief we will have to explore. This specter clearly looms before us in Devall and Sessions's sinister remark: "the longer we wait [in population control] the more drastic will be the measures needed" (72). Finally, deep ecology, with its concern for the manipulation of nature, exhibits very little concern for the manipulation of human beings by one another, except perhaps when it comes to the drastic measures that may be "needed" for "population control.". Let us face these differences bluntly: deep ecology, despite all its social rhetoric, has virtually no real sense that our ecological problems have their ultimate roots in society and in social problems. As Gandhi told the British, imperialism left India's wretched poor and homeless with little more in life than the immediate gratification provided by sex and an understandably numbed sense of personal, much less social, responsibility. Likewise, letting the USA. `` for his hatred of spirituality truly ecological, in effect, no... Sessions often write with smug assurance on issues that they form a meaningful and creative?! It has to be truly ecological, in their Native habitat, the tiniest microbes in the other is! 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