Deep ecology is a new way to think about
our relationship to the Earth - and thinking is a prelude to action
An Interview With Michael E. Zimmerman, by Alan AtKisson
A philosophy is, among other things, a system of thought
that governs conduct. But in the original Greek it meant "love of
wisdom" – and we need all the wisdom we can get to face the implications
of global climate change. Several new philosophies have developed in
response to the worsening environmental crisis, and among the most
interesting is something called "deep ecology." It calls for nothing
less than a complete overhaul of the way humans live on the Earth.
Deep ecology is not without its critics, nor its competitors. And
like any radically new way of thinking, it raises more questions than
it answers. But since every major change of direction in humanity’s
recent history has been supported – or ignited – by a new philosophy,
its appearance is a very hopeful sign.
Michael E. Zimmerman is Professor of Philosophy at Tulane
University, New Orleans, and was recently named to the Chair of his
department. He has written widely on technology and the environment and
recently completed a second book on the work of Martin Heidegger. In our
issue on militarism (IC
#20), he wrote on the distorted
mythologies that drive the arms race and the new mythologies we must
develop to achieve "something other than war."
Recently Michael was in Seattle to deliver a lecture on deep
ecology to philosophy students at Seattle University. We took the
opportunity to speak with him about deep ecology, its relationship to
ecofeminism, the mystery of postmodernism, and how a philosophy might
change the world.
Alan: What is "deep ecology?"
Michael: Deep ecology is an environmental movement
initiated by a Norwegian philosopher, Arnie Naess, in 1972. He wasn’t
the first to dream up the idea of a radical change in humanity’s
relationship to nature, but he coined the term "deep ecology" and helped
to give it a theoretical foundation. Deep ecology portrays itself as
"deep" because it asks deeper questions about the place of human life,
who we are.
Deep ecology is founded on two basic principles: one is a scientific
insight into the interrelatedness of all systems of life on Earth,
together with the idea that
anthropocentrism – human-centeredness – is a misguided way of seeing things. Deep ecologists say that an
ecocentric
attitude is more consistent with the truth about the nature of life on
Earth. Instead of regarding humans as something completely unique or
chosen by God, they see us as integral threads in the fabric of life.
They believe we need to develop a less dominating and aggressive posture
towards the Earth if we and the planet are to survive.
The second component of deep ecology is what Arnie Naess calls the
need for human self-realization. Instead of identifying with our egos or
our immediate families, we would learn to identify with trees and
animals and plants, indeed the whole ecosphere. This would involve a
pretty radical change of consciousness, but it would make our behavior
more consistent with what science tells us is necessary for the
well-being of life on Earth. We just wouldn’t do certain things that
damage the planet, just as you wouldn’t cut off your own finger.
Alan: How does deep ecology relate to ecofeminism? Or do they relate?
Michael: There are many ecofeminists – people like
Joanna Macy for example – who would call themselves deep ecologists, but
there are some ecofeminists who’ve made an important claim against it.
They say the real problem isn’t anthropocentrism but
androcentrism –
man-centeredness.
They say that 10,000 years of patriarchy is ultimately responsible for
the destruction of the biosphere and the development of authoritarian
practices, both socially and environmentally.
Deep ecologists concede that patriarchy has been responsible for a
lot of violence against women and nature. But while they oppose the
oppression of women and promote egalitarian social relations, deep
ecologists also warn that getting rid of patriarchy would not
necessarily cure the problem, because you can imagine a society with
fairly egalitarian social relationships where nature is still used
instrumentally.
Alan: And then there’s a third big player on the scene, "social ecology," with its own critique of deep ecology.
Michael: Right. According to social ecologist Murray
Bookchin, deep ecology fails to see that the problem of the
environmental crisis is directly linked to authoritarianism and
hierarchy. Bookchin says
those are the real problems, and they’re expressed both socially and environmentally.
Alan: So social ecologists see things like homelessness as being caused by the same mechanisms that cause rainforest devastation?
Michael: Also racism, sexism, third world
exploitation, mistreatment of other marginalized groups – they’re all
phenomena on the same spectrum. By supposedly not recognizing the social
roots of the environmental crisis, deep ecologists invite themselves to
be accused of nature mysticism. Social ecologists say we need to change
our
social structure, and that the elimination of authoritarianism and hierarchy in human society will end the environmental crisis.
Deep ecologists say there’s no certainty that would happen. Again,
you can imagine a case where social hierarchy is eliminated and yet the
new egalitarian society dominates nature just as badly. The problem is
that anthropocentrism can take on different forms.
Alan: So what’s their political agenda? What, in practicality, do deep ecologists want?
Michael: That’s an interesting question, because I
don’t think anyone knows what the best political vehicle is for this new
way of thinking. Certainly the old ideologies of left and right are
pretty bankrupt, in terms of their ability to address these issues.
Critics have latched onto the fact that on one or two occasions, certain deep ecologists have called for
very Draconian
measures to save the planet from destruction at the hands of human
beings. The danger that social ecologists and others see is that what
these deep ecologists envision will become a new kind of a
totalitarianism or "eco-fascism" – in other words, some kind of world
government which would compel people to change their social practices
and totally control their behavior to make it consistent with the
demands of the ecosphere.
But most deep ecologists talk about the need for decentralization,
bioregions, the breakdown of the totalizing impulse of industrialism, an
end to authoritarianism, and the development of a much more
fragmented society with new kinds of relationships. This seems far
closer to the truth about deep ecology, and none of it seems consistent
with the possibility of totalitarianism.
Alan: The fact that you’re lecturing about deep
ecology indicates that it’s entered mainstream academic world to some
extent. How do you interpret that?
Michael: That the modern academic world is being
taken over by people who were raised in the 1960s, and many of these
people have now developed the theoretical language and insights to bring
their critiques of racism, sexism, industrialism, authoritarianism, and
other "isms," into the academic marketplace. They make use of the work
of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Martin Heidegger and other
postmodern theorists who have criticized the whole of western history
since Plato as being a series of hidden power trips. The ecological
nightmare is supposedly just the latest manifestation of the
consequences of those power trips.
Alan: What’s a short definition of "postmodernism?"
Michael: Postmodernism is a complex phenomenon. It’s
a movement that looks for alternatives to the basic political, social,
epistemological, metaphysical, scientific and gender-oriented categories
of modernity. Now, what is "modernity?" Well, you might say it’s the
Enlightenment and its consequences. It’s the assertion of a universal
conception of what it means to be human, and this conception turns out
to have the same characteristics as educated, white European men.
So postmodernism rejects that conception. It rejects the belief that
there’s only one kind of rationality, called "analytical scientific"
rationality. It rejects anthropocentrism to some extent, and certainly
ethnocentrism, as well as sexism and patriarchy. It rejects the belief
that we have absolute foundations both for our scientific and our
political claims. Postmodernism is about the world that we have lived in
since the 1960s, where authority of all kinds has been questioned.
Alan: In the popular culture, where the term
gets thrown around most cavalierly, it seems also to refer to pluralism
and a rejection of the linear model of time and progress.
Michael: Exactly. I just heard a talk by Daniel Dennet, the author of
Brainstorms and
The Intentional Stance.
He’s a well-known contemporary philosopher, and he said that
neurophysiologists are learning to live with the possibility that there
is no "central processing unit" in the brain that controls and filters
everything, and that there are parallel temporal sequences going on
there.
For example, when you’re dreaming a dream that ends up blending
into the sound of the alarm clock, how does that happen? It may be that
the sound of the alarm clock triggers off a dream sequence
in reverse, but we reorder it in our consciousness so it’s dreamt the right way.
Now this sounds to me like another instance in which scientific
discovery parallels changes in political and social views. It’s possible
that the brain has many different centers which interact – and it
works.
So we can imagine a society which is similarly decentralized, and it
can work. We don’t have to worry about holding it all together with a
centralized, global control system.
Another important postmodernist idea is that modernity is organized
by totalizing narratives, or "metanarratives," such as "the triumph of
the proletariat" or "the conquest of nature by man." These narratives
make a claim to universality and objectivity, but in fact they express
some kind of ideological and power-oriented perspective which needs to
be deconstructed and examined.
Alan: This sounds more and more like the anatomy
of a shift in consciousness. You know it’s serious if it’s even reached
into the university.
Michael: But many of these university people have
not yet moved beyond the level of critique. It’s much more difficult for
them to formulate a vision or say what they want the world to look
like, possibly because they’re afraid of making a new totalizing
statement. Also, the role models aren’t there in the academic world yet.
Foucault and Derrida and so on haven’t said many positive things about
the future.
But that’s starting to change. The Center for a Post-modern World,
David Ray Griffin’s group in California, is a step in that positive
direction.
Alan: How do these kinds of developments in philosophy and other academic disciplines filter their way out into actual social change?
Michael: That’s a very good question, and it’s an
unfortunate response I have to give. I think that philosophy has made
itself socially useless. No one cares what philosophers say. Now, that
wasn’t true before World War II. Dewey and other American pragmatists
had an enormous impact on American education and social reflection. But
after the war philosophers, with their interest in analytic philosophy
and epistemology, made their questions and their research not relevant
to the larger public. They engaged in much less reflection upon the
categories and presuppositions of culture, and their reflection became
so rarefied that they just took themselves out of the ball game.
Alan: But now we see deep ecologist philosophers
and others actually energizing social movements, like the Greens or the
Earth First!ers.
Michael: Right. These changes come about peripherally. When Peter Singer wrote his famous book
Animal Liberation
in the middle 1970s, he legitimized – because of his status as a
philosopher – an area of discourse called "animal rights." This has now
burgeoned into an enormous amount of writing in the ethics journals
about the moral considerability of non-human beings, which wasn’t there
before. That was the wedge which cracked the door of anthropocentrism
open. Feminism and the civil rights movement also cracked open the door,
because they revealed that our ethical systems and our assumptions
about selfhood were rather narrow and in need of expanding. Now deep
ecology is able to attack anthropocentrism more directly.
Alan: A critique I hear often is that deep
ecologists want to return to a way of life that’s totally tied to the
rhythms of the Earth, but at this point we have so disturbed those
rhythms that we can’t even consider going back. To retreat to a
pre-technological state would in fact be dooming the Earth to
destruction, whereas what we need now is to be more engaged in trying to
repair the damage. How would a deep ecologist respond?
Michael: I think deep ecologists have mixed emotions
about that, but I would agree with that critique. For example, if we
stopped our development at the current level, it would be a catastrophe,
because our production methods are so dirty and inefficient and
destructive that if we keep this up, we’re really in trouble.
Some deep ecologists say that it would be all for the best if the
industrial world were just to collapse, despite all the human suffering
that would entail. If such a thing ever occurs, some people have
suggested, we could never revive industrialization again because the raw
materials are no longer easily accessible. I hope that
doesn’t happen, and yet it
may happen.
Now, social ecologists say that deep ecologists flirt with fascism
when they talk about returning to an "organic" social system that is
"attuned to nature." They note that reactionary thinkers often contrast
the supposedly "natural" way of life – which to them means social
Darwinism and authoritarian social systems – with "modernity," which in
politial terms means progressive social movements like liberalism and
Marxism. But deep ecologists recognize this danger. They call not for a
regression to collective authoritarianism, but for the
evolution of a mode of awareness that doesn’t lend itself to authoritarianism of any kind.
So I think the only thing we can do is to move forward. We need to
develop our efficiency and production methods so that we’ll be able to
take some of the pressure off the environment. We also need to develop
increasing wealth for the highly populated countries so their
populations will go down. [Ed. Note: See Lappé and Schurman, "The
Population Puzzle," in
IC #21.]
There’s a necessity for new technology. The question is, can it be
made consistent with our growing awareness that the planet is really
hurting?
Alan: And will it be developed in time?
Michael: Well, in time for what? It may not happen
in time to save America’s supremacy as an industrial power, for
instance. A lot of horrible stuff may happen in the next twenty years,
and there may be tremendous political fallout. The 1990s are going to be
really weird, because of millennial thinking as the year 2000
approaches. Some people are going to become increasingly frightened as
economic, political and natural events become more problematic. There
may be a lot of mass movements, some of them regressive and reactionary.
But it may be that those will be the last gasp of an old way of being.
That’s how some people view Reagan, as the last stand of a dying
ideology.
Alan: Will the new ideology be deep ecology?
Michael: Who knows? Deep ecology claims we need a
wider identification with nature. Now, why would we even hope for such a
transformation? To hope for it means to believe in the possibility of
human evolution, and that, I think, is where deep ecology comes into connection with the Enlightenment and with social ecology.
For all its problems, there was a liberatory dimension to the
Enlightenment which is part of the American experience, and I think
American environmentalists need to tap into that. We don’t need to
reject science and the Enlightenment and American political values. We
need to understand more deeply what the roots of those values are. The
ideal of freedom is a
radically important idea in human
history. The idea that each individual person is deserving of respect,
is deserving of right treatment, is deserving of consideration, should
not be made a slave, should not be exploited – these are
incredibly
novel ideas in human history. These ideas have to be preserved if we’re
to take any further steps. We can’t happily expect to treat the natural
world appropriately if we don’t even treat other human beings
appropriately.
We have to
finish the job of human liberation – and this is
where social ecology is right – at the same time that we have to tackle
the problem of the domination of nature. You can’t take care of the
environment while people in the Sudan or Nicaragua are being cut up by
imperialistic practices, east or west. It’s all connected together. Deep
ecology hasn’t articulated this view very well because it’s afraid
we’ll fall back into anthropocentrism.
But humanity is part of nature too, and the development of our
awareness and our human freedom is an important step in ending the
environmental crisis. I would say that deep ecology is part of the great
liberation movement that culminated in the Enlightenment and now is
trying to move beyond the Enlightenment’s limitations. It’s not just
about freeing white men from the control of the king, and it’s not just
about freeing women or blacks anymore. It’s about freeing
all beings from unnecessary kinds of control and exploitation.
Alan: There are certain schools of psychotherapy
which say, in essence, that you have to love yourself first. You have
to build self-esteem in the individual before you can worry about
tackling the individual’s relationship to others. Yet there’s an element
of human self-loathing to some aspects of deep ecology that strikes me
as unhealthy.
Michael: That’s an important point, because people tend to forget that
we -
our bodies – are nature. The way we control and repress our own bodies
and feelings is reflected, I think, in our treatment of all other life.
Statements from some of the Earth First!ers would give you the
impression that the whole species is screwed up, but again, I think this
is a minority dimension. Warwick Fox, a deep ecology theorist in
Australia, says we have to distinguish between being
misanthropic – hating humanity – and being
anti-anthropocentric.
There’s a difference between saying we want to get rid of all human
beings, and saying that humans aren’t the most important species on the
planet.
Alan: My sense is that these competing
environmental views are all in the same boat, and they’re just arguing
over which side of the boat to sit on.
Michael: Our paranoia and our "I’m right and you’re
wrong" mentality are reflected in the arguments you hear among deep
ecologists and social ecologists and ecofeminists and whatever. We’re
not really transformed yet. We would like to be, but our behavior shows
that we’re not. We’re groping for an alternative way of having
conversation.
We’ve got a long way to go, and I don’t despair about it. The other
day I saw a TV program about the burning of the Amazon rainforest, and I
felt terrible. I became anxious and I felt this tremendous sadness, a
sense of irreparable loss. I thought, this is what a child must feel
when his home is being destroyed. The planet we’ve grown up on is being
changed. It’s a real loss for us and for the other species that are
being killed. And yet, who knows what this means? Ninety-five percent of
the species that ever lived are dead. Why? Evolution isn’t sentimental –
it does what it does.
I’d like to stop the burning of the rainforests right now, but that’s
not going to happen. Some of it will get saved, but you know, we cut
down a forest that stretched from New York to the Mississippi River and
from the Gulf coast into Canada in just a century or two. We don’t miss
it because we never saw it. We see the Brazilian rainforest burning and
we miss it. And it’s a threat to us – there’s a lot of self-interest in
our concern about that.
I’m increasingly trying to acknowledge the mourning I have and to
say, "I don’t know what this environmental crisis really means. I can’t
control it, I can’t stop it, and I don’t know where it’s headed." At the
same time I do my best to try to develop the awareness, the economic
and political practices, the new attitudes and so on which can
contribute to preserving the biosphere. That’s as much as I can hope
for.
I’m what you might call a Buddhist Roman Catholic, and at mass I hear
the priest now talking about the need to heal our relationship to the
Earth. The idea of a personal salvation – that I can be saved but the
rest of creation can’t – isn’t understandable to me anymore. So I’m also
hopeful that as our crisis deepens there will be an alternative
Judeo-Christian theology available to people, one which calls for the
affirmation of life, for taking care of the Earth, and for fostering the
sisterhood and brotherhood of all other living things
