Deep Ecology: Life After Life?
NINA WITOSZEK & MARTIN LEE MUELLER
Centre for Development and the Environment, Oslo University, Norway
nina.witoszek@sum.uio.no; m.l.mueller@sum.uio.no
ABSTRACT
This introductory chapter interrogates the intellectual robustness and mobilizing potential of
Arne Naess's deep ecology in the 21st century. Our contention is that deep ecology is not a
spent force, as some influential Western philosophers argue in this volume. On the contrary,
ecophilosophy has left a legacy which remains a significant part of the ongoing cultural
innovation for a sustainable future. As several essays in this collection show, Arne Naess’
thought feeds into new, science-based visions of the relationship between humans and nature.
More importantly, it has got a new lease of life in the South, where biocentric cosmovisions
play an ever more important role, not just in philosophical, but political debates which have an
impact on Latin America's future.
Keywords: ecophilosophy, cultural innovation, social impact of philosophy, panpsychism, the
future of deep ecology
1
In a magisterial attempt to reclaim and reimagine the pragmatist philosophy for the needs of
our time, Robert Unger has asked a poignant question:
How can society and culture be so organized that large numbers of ordinary men and women
have a better chance to awake from the narcoleptic daze, outside the circle of intimacy and love,
without having to do so as pawns and belligerents?... How can an individual born into a small
country live a large life, how can the state help him widen the stage on which he can live such
life? (2009: 205)
This volume is the reassessment of a philosophical project that attempted to answer a question
similar to that posed by Unger: how can we live a larger life by waking up from inertia and
making our planet into a better home? Arne Naess’ deep ecology – first enunciated in the early
1970s – was a pioneering codification of the idea of a paradigm shift in Western perceptions of
modernity. It stood some of the central modern ideas and concepts on their head: it challenged
anthropocentric optimists by insisting on the intrinsic value of all living beings; it invited an
individual self to become an enlarged, ecocentric self; it proposed a self-realization in harmony
with all living beings. Last but not least, it demanded that the intellectual defenders of nature
should stand up and act on nature’s behalf. And although some of the Naessian rhetoric was
also about changing existing structures of power and society, the revolutionary component in
deep ecology has been a matter of multiple interpretations and contestations, including evasions
and inconsistencies in Naess’ own declarations (e.g. Witoszek and Anker 1998: 239-256).
Much has changed since the time when Arne Næss first spelled out his eight-point
testament (Naess 1973).1 The relaxed, green idealism and flamboyance of the students of 1968
has been replaced by the market-place efficiency of the twenty-first century academy. Utopias
of all kind – including deep ecological visions – have been contested and deconstructed. In the
late 1980s, another Norwegian-bred response to the accelerating ecological crisis – the
Brundtland Report – proposed a comparatively less radical transition towards the ambitious
goal of living sustainably (that is, indefinitely) on a finite planet. What is left of Naess’
‘enlarged self’?
This volume of Worldviews reassesses the value and legacy of deep ecology as a modern
nature philosophy. Has Arne Naess’ green codex had any lasting impact in the socio-economic
realm? Or is it, as some of Naess’ critics and former colleagues argue, a spent force, an
1 The eight points of Naess’ platform were expounded in the article ‘The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range
Ecology Movement: A Summary’ published by Inquiry, an interdisciplinary journal founded by Naess (18: 95-
100). Since then the eight points have become a meme and can be found at:
http://www.deepecology.org/platform.htm
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anachronistic remnant much like the Catholic Pope: preaching a green orthodoxy without
anybody listening (not to mention practicing)? What is the relationship between ‘green
philosophizing’ – as an act of social criticism – and risk-ridden political movements and acts
of civil disobedience in the 21st century? In short, is there a life after life in this philosophy?
Deep ecology is among the earliest philosophical responses to an environmental and
civilizational crisis which, if anything, became more, not less, acute in the half-century since
Naess first proclaimed the coming of a ‘deep, long-range ecological movement’ from a podium
in Bucharest. Between then and now, half of all the planet’s wild animals have disappeared (in
numbers), and UNEP estimates that as many as 200 species may be going extinct, on average,
every day (WWF Living Planet Report 2016). Geologists are now officially recognizing that
humans have become a geological force more powerful than volcanoes, ushering in that
unprecedented chapter in Earth’s ancient history widely spoken of as the Anthropocene. The
perfect moral storm that Naess foresaw is still raging around us, and business-as-usual seems
as inept a response today as it was fifty years ago. It is against this backdrop that this volume
has turned both to pioneers and new advocates of a green philosophy to answer the question of
what is the relevance of deep ecology for our time of uncertainty, and loss. Given the magnitude
and speed of the disruptions we are witnessing, and given the inertia of disruptive forces that
still escalate their impact on the biosphere, does not Naess’ proposition of a fair society living
modestly, inside the biosphere’s fragile envelopes seem anachronistic or utopian?
As we have indicated, the political and intellectual landscape has changed since deep
ecology’s infant days. Concepts such as ‘sustainability,’ ‘environmental ethics,’ and ‘animal
rights’ are now common currency in debates on the environmental crisis, though, admittedly,
the deep ecology platform is rarely cited in the 21st century Bildung. To some, Naess’ distinction
between ‘shallow’ and ‘deep’ ecologies seems to have lost its critical edge, eclipsed by the
mantra of ‘sustainable development’: a concept that is as ubiquitous as it is contested. In the
world where the great polluters, US, China and India, drive simultaneously green and carbon
locomotives, things surely remain ‘shallow’. However, there is also abundant evidence to the
effect that the greening of the world started by such thinkers as Naess and other contemporary
pioneers is a fact. Admittedly, the journey towards truly averting planetary ecocide is complex
and full of conflicting interests and setbacks, but it also involves quantum leaps and lucky
breaks (Midttun and Witoszek 2016).
The Irish poet W. B. Yeats has captured the intricate relationship between change and
stasis in his poem ‘Easter 1916’
3
Hearts with one purpose alone,
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone,
To trouble the living stream.
To attend to the symbols: the stream represents the wheeling energies of a live thought, the
Panta Rei – or everything flows – in the tradition of Heraclitus. The stone is not merely a
hardened opinion, an abstraction, or a dogma, and it doesn’t ultimately matter how long the
stone’s already been lying there in the river, submerged by the flowing waters. For the stone
actively troubles the stream, its stoniness is stubborn; it diverts and redirects and shapes the
riverine flow.
The stone’s in the midst of all.
There are some critics who claim that deep ecology has hardened over time and is now
anachronistic: yet another stone to trouble the ‘living stream’ of the ever more complex
contemporary environmental debate, ultimately just another bothersome obstacle with no
ability to actually divert the flow of history. There are others – including exasperated pioneers
of ecological philosophy such as Freya Mathews and J. Baird Callicott in this volume – who
mourn over the detritus of the philosophy which, they claim, ‘made nothing happen.’
We disagree with these despondent perceptions. History has taught us that the life and
death of ideas – especially the fate of cultural and ideological programs and visions – is a
process of rise, retreat and resurgence: a mosaic of climaxes and anti-climaxes. Over one and a
half centuries ago Nietzsche boldly declared that God was dead. And indeed, for a while, many
acolytes of the theory of secularization, from Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann to James
Turner, found abundant evidence to document just this argument (Berger 1967; Luckmann
1967; Turner 1985). However, the religious resurgence in the twenty-first century has mocked
Nietzsche’s dictum, perhaps best summed up by the contrary motto: ’Nietzsche is dead.
Sincerely, God.’ As Daniel Bell has argued in one of his clairvoyant essays: ’Culture is always
a ricorso’: an endless return of past stories and ideas (Bell 1991: 333). Accordingly, cultural
innovation is less about creative destruction and more a process of constant and creative
reimagining of images and visions that were ‘forgotten’ or prematurely thought to be buried or
extinct. Think of the Romantic renaissance of Shakespeare after two centuries of oblivion, or
the rediscovery of Spinoza or Lao-Tsu by Naess and many other twentieth century ecological
thinkers. Or, to use a more malign example, consider the return to Teutonic mythology in Nazi
symbolism or the resurrection of the imagery of the Battle of Kosovo (1448) during the
twentieth century Balkan Wars.
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In short, the real-life potency of seemingly dormant ideological or philosophical visions
is sometimes cyclical and often unpredictable. It is no surprise that many architects of
groundbreaking environmental visions – including some rueful pioneers of ecophilosophy
invited to contribute this volume – are unaware of the intricate ways in which their ideas have
penetrated into political or economic realms and spurned vibrant movements and trends,
including the 21st century ‘green growth.’ Or, encapsulated in their insular cultural contexts,
they may have overlooked the novel cosmovisions, such as those in Latin America, which have
been either inspired by – or run parallel to – the original deep ecological thinking (see chapters
5 and 6 in this volume).
We contend that deep ecology has been a tacit primus motor in a series of social and
environmental transformations which go back to the ‘heroic’ 1970s and 1980s. It started a
visionary cycle, one which has gotten consolidated, motivated public interventions, even forged
a hardcore, economic ‘product cycle’. To spell it out – there are reasons to believe that industrial
learning for developing green technologies, as well as many conservation initiatives, would not
have taken place had it not been for mobilizing green visions stemming from such diverse actors
and movements as deep ecology, the Sierra Club, or the green, anti-nuclear movement in
Germany. Such visions were initially dismissed as mere chimeras by the apostles of the carbon
industry. But they proved crucial to the emergence of the agenda of ecological modernity that
has driven incremental green innovation; witness the success of Energiewende in Germany, a
genuine turnaround that started at the grassroots and then burgeoned, quickly reaching a critical
mass that led to courageous public policy-decisions and technological innovation. As soon as
the technology of renewables ‘colonized’ the mainstream markets, it has started feeding back
to societies and enriching visions of a more humane, and greener planet.
But there are other emerging ramifications of ecophilosophy. Some contributions in this
volume (see especially chapters 7 and 8) are audacious enough to ‘evolve the future’ of deep
ecology by tapping into what has been called the panspychist turn in philosophy. Panpsychism
challenges the Galilean-Cartesian project which stripped matter of its sensory qualities, and
insisted that only the firmly disembodied res cogitans possesses a genuinely interior dimension.
In doing so, the materialist paradigm relegated everything other than the human mind to being
‘pure outside’. This dualistic solution to the fluid relationship between mind and body has been
at the heart of the modern project from its inception. Today, it remains an open wound that
many have diagnosed but few have been able to mend. Recent years, however, have seen a
renewed curiosity and openness for panpsychic responses to what David Chalmers famously
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coined the “hard problem”, evidenced for example by Thomas Nagels’ 2012 book Mind and
Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False.
One of contributors to this volume, Arne Johan Vetlesen, in his 2015 book The Denial
of Nature, has argued that many of these recent panpsychic articulations may actually not be
radical enough: ‘Few philosophers have ventured beyond the body to consider nondualistic
possibilities of matter per se’ (Vetlesen 2015: 194). Another writer in this issue, Freya
Mathews, has discussed this problem at some length. Mathews covets a panpsychic position
that would truly overcome the old duality and articulate a coherent mind-matter-unity. What
would that be, Mathews asks, to posit an ‘inner experience’ inherent in all physicality, a
‘presence-to-itself’ in all matter? Mathews also suggests that such a radically nondualistic,
panpsychist turn in philosophy would undermine the very foundations of modern civilization.
In her 2003 book, For Love of Matter: A Contemporary Panpsychism, she writes that such a
turn would completely re-orchestrate
the epistemological and spiritual orientation to the world that underpins it. Hence, although it is
the environmental crisis that is calling us to this reorientation, the reorientation itself is much
more far-reaching in scope than has thus far been acknowledged by even the most radical
streams of the environmental movement. The reanimation entailed by panpsychism embraces
materiality per se, and hence the mineral and the artefactual, not merely the biological or the
natural. Panpsychism in the present context is thus not equivalent to ecologism; it encompasses
but also exceeds a ‘deep ecological’ metaphysics (Mathews 2003: 28f; quoted in Vetlesen 2015:
195).
This volume takes a few steps toward that ambitious goal. If, as Mathew argues, any
philosophical view that reunites materiality with mentality can be thought of as panpsychist,
and if, as Vetlesen argues, any such view would help ‘dismantle the foundational dualism of
Western thought’, then Tim Morton’s and Andreas Weber’s essays propose original paths to
transcending the old dualism. Feelings, Weber suggests, may just be what allows us to
experience ‘being matter from the inside’, and to find ourselves entangled with the whole. It is
through inner experience, Weber further suggests, that “organisms reveal that ‘observations’
are not made by ‘observers’ about ‘objects’, but actually are the inward aspect of the world’s
involvement with itself.” In this view, reality is deeply suffused and saturated with subjectivity.
And our particularly human style of subjectivity is not evidence of our alienation from reality.
It rather enables us to explore with greater subtlety the ways in which the whole is ever striving
to be in touch with, and come to terms with, itself – a new twist in Naess’ quest for articulating
ways in which the ecological self might come to realize itself.
This issue of Worldviews is thus representative of new – critical and creative –
perceptions of deep ecology today. Paradoxically, the essays written by Western animatueurs
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of deep ecology (especially Freya Mathews in this volume) strike the most rhapsodic note. In
contrast, the contributions from the younger generation of American and European
philosophers, as well as green philosophers coming for the South, testify to the enduring energy
of deep ecology both as a body of thought and as a movement. They show that there are ‘spots
of Naessianism’ as far as in the Andes, visions which speak of a green philosophy, lifestyle,
and politics as a Gesamtkunstwerk which boldly experiment with alternatives to current
versions of modernity. Further, the very presence of global grassroots environmental
movements – including such influential mobilizations as 350.org, Deep Green Resistance, Buen
Vivir, Transition Towns, Earthwatch, the Earth Charter Initiative, or Standing Rock, to name
but a few – is in no small part due to the early impetus of that nonconformist environmental
philosopher who spent much of his time up in his mountain cabin Tvergastein, pondering the
flow of world events as he was surrounded on all sides by the ancient and seemingly timeless
Arctic tundra of the Hardangervidda Plateau.
Up there, dwarf birches may have struggled for fifty years before reaching the height of
a man’s ankle, and time can be measured by the imperceptible growth of green and black lichen
edging out a modest living on eroding granite. Nature’s rhythm inspired in this mountaineer-
philosopher an idiosyncratic perception of time and change. A radical landscape gave birth to
a radical thought. Reading and writing by his cabin window at 1,500 meters above sea level
after a morning climb to the summit of the Hallingskarvet Mountain, Naess’ imagination was
drawn far and wide across a substantial portion of all of southern Norway: tens of thousands of
square kilometers of mountains, deep gorges, and lush valleys teeming with evergreen forest.
In this landscape of extremes, where the Hardangerjøkul Glacier still lingers from the most
recent ice age, and death was never an abstract proposition - never farther away than a careless
step, a sudden rockslide, or an avalanche - Naess’ radical philosophical proposals seemed to
strangely fit. Where, if not here, could it seem perfectly self-evident that we must fundamentally
and boldly rethink the very foundations of our relationship as humans to the planet? Where, if
not here, would it appear obvious that thought and action must ever remain tightly coupled, and
any deep questioning would ultimately need to translate into a commitment for concrete actions
that would avert an ecological Armageddon?
Philosophically, Naess’ vision emerged from his dialogue with Spinoza, Far Eastern
philosophies, as well as on the cosmologies of indigenous peoples from regions far unlike the
one he himself felt most at home in. But clearly, ecophilosophy also has distinct vernacular
roots (Witoszek 1998). For all its cross-pollination with wisdom traditions from distant locales,
for all its cosmopolitan curiosity, openness, and syncretism, deep ecology is also uniquely, and
7
unapologetically Norwegian in its very pragmatism. It is at home in the native nature tradition,
where, for a long time, people’s life philosophy –both the one at the academy and the one on
the ground – was a frilufts philosophy, a philosophy of the ‘open air’: one which stemmed from
the necessity to listen to nature’s laws, adapt and build resilience. And this ‘Norwegianness’,
this at-homeness in the natural world, is both a point of ecophilosophy’s strong attraction and
a source of its limitations. Its social vision springs from a culture which has relatively limited
experience with civilizational collapse, and whose proud and free peasants lived for a long time
a relatively harmonious, pastoral life on the margins of a turbulent continent. Ultimately, it rests
on an optimistic belief in a cosmic whole where every organism - from the King to your local
friendly wolf - is a good, self-restrained Protestant citizen.
And yet, as this volume shows, Naess’ philosophy has never been a mere utopian
‘neverland’ out of touch with historic eventfulness. It was not created as a fancy story from a
place of privilege. Neither was it meant to simply carve out a humble, learned existence inside
philosophical journals. Naess’ thought came to life, and continues to live, as much in
philosophical dialogue as in what our contributor Eduardo Gudynas calls ‘ethics in the blood’
(see chapter 6). As a seasoned mountaineer, Naess knew that to accomplish the seemingly
impossible feat of summiting a vertical ascent, one not only needed a daring vision but also had
to give attention to the gritty, piecemeal work that would lead from here to there. Failure to
attend to either would be fatal. A truism, surely, but one resonant with Scandinavia’s
topography, where the art and craft of making a living had always demanded a peculiar mix of
vision and pragmatism, boldness and humility, as well as a die-hard confidence of success even
in the face of ludicrous odds.
To sum up: This issue is not designed to offer an apologia for ‘Naessianism’, nor is it
our intention to predict deep ecology’s future. We have gathered voices who engage in critical
– even hard-hitting – dialogues with Naess’ philosophy, as much as with the concrete impacts
his thought may, or – as some authors argue – failed to have had, on the ground. We suggest
that this may be the best way to encounter deep ecology: not by calcifying it, not by erecting
monuments in its name, and not by allowing it to quietly live on as an outdated dogma. The
way to renew it is via the same skepticism, open-mindedness, and curiosity that Naess himself
advocated as his fundamental philosophical stance.
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