Deep Ecology¶

Deep ecology is an environmental philosophy and movement holding that the living world has value in itself, independent of its usefulness to people, and that the ecological crisis can't be solved by technical fixes alone. It asks for a change in how humans understand their place in nature. The term was coined by the Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer Arne Næss (1912–2009) in 1973.

It's worth separating two senses of the term:

• Deep ecology as a philosophy: Næss's ideas about intrinsic value, "deep questioning," and Self-realization.
• Deep ecology as a movement: the broad set of people and groups who accept its core platform, often for very different personal, religious, or philosophical reasons.

1. Origins¶

Næss introduced the idea in a short 1973 paper in the journal Inquiry, "The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement," based on a talk he gave in Bucharest in 1972. That was the same year as the Stockholm UN Conference on the Human Environment and The Limits to Growth, when environmental concern was going mainstream.

Influences Næss acknowledged include:

• Baruch Spinoza: a single, unified nature (Deus sive Natura) of which humans are one expression, not a separate ruling part.
• Mahatma Gandhi: non-violence, and self-realization as a life goal.
• Mahayana Buddhism: interdependence and an expansive sense of self.
• Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold: Silent Spring's warnings about technological hubris, and Leopold's land ethic, which extended moral concern to the "biotic community" (see Ecology Foundations & Stewardship).
• Life in the mountains: Næss spent long stretches at Tvergastein, his hut high in the Hallingskarvet massif in Norway, and said much of his thinking came from living there.

The American philosophers George Sessions and Bill Devall brought deep ecology to a wide North American audience, especially with Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered (1985).

2. Shallow vs. Deep¶

Næss's founding distinction was between two kinds of environmental concern:

Næss didn't dismiss "shallow" work. Pollution control and resource management matter. His point was that they treat symptoms. The word "deep" refers to deep questioning: asking why we value what we value, and following the answer down to basic assumptions about the good life and humanity's place in the world, rather than stopping at "how do we reduce emissions?"

3. The Eight-Point Platform¶

In 1984, while camping in Death Valley, Næss and Sessions wrote a short platform they hoped people from many backgrounds could agree with. This is a paraphrase:

1. Intrinsic value: The wellbeing and flourishing of human and non-human life have value in themselves, independent of their usefulness to humans.
2. Diversity: The richness and diversity of life forms add to these values and are also values in themselves.
3. Limits on reducing it: Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to meet vital needs.
4. Population: Human life and cultures can flourish with a substantially smaller human population, and the flourishing of non-human life requires one.
5. Current interference: Present human interference with the non-human world is excessive, and getting worse.
6. Policy change: Policies must therefore change. This affects basic economic, technological, and ideological structures, and the result would be deeply different from the present.
7. Quality over quantity: The ideological change is mainly about appreciating life quality (living in situations of inherent value) rather than an ever-higher standard of living. People should be deeply aware of the difference between "big" and "great."
8. Obligation to act: Those who accept these points have an obligation to try, directly or indirectly, to make the necessary changes.

The platform is deliberately thin. It doesn't say what "vital needs" are, how population should fall, or which policies to adopt. Næss intended people to reach it from many different starting points and to work out the details for their own situations.

4. The Apron Diagram: Many Roots, One Platform¶

Næss illustrated the movement with what's often called the apron diagram, a four-level structure:

1. Ultimate premises: religious or philosophical starting points (Buddhism, Christianity, Spinozism, Indigenous worldviews, personal experience, etc.)
2. The platform: the eight points, shared by supporters
3. General consequences: broad lifestyle and policy positions that follow
4. Concrete decisions: specific actions in specific places

Different people can start from very different level-1 premises, agree at level 2, and then spread back out into very different level-4 actions suited to their own bioregion and circumstances. This is why Næss described deep ecology as a movement rather than a doctrine.

5. Ecosophy and Self-realization¶

Næss called a personal ecological philosophy an ecosophy: "eco" (household, dwelling) plus "sophia" (wisdom). He named his own Ecosophy T, after Tvergastein, and encouraged everyone to develop their own rather than adopt his.

The top norm of Ecosophy T is Self-realization! (capital S). Næss meant it in a specific way:

• The narrow ego-self is the isolated individual chasing its own interests.
• The wider ecological Self grows as we identify with other beings: family, community, other species, places, landscapes.
• As identification widens, protecting the rest of nature stops feeling like self-sacrifice and becomes a form of self-interest, because their flourishing is part of yours.

This links to Næss's idea of the "beautiful action" (borrowed from Kant): the best environmental behaviour comes from inclination, not reluctant duty. People who love a marsh protect it gladly. Moralizing at people works less well than helping them experience and identify with nature.

Næss also proposed biospherical egalitarianism — in principle: every living thing has an equal right to live and blossom. The "in principle" carries a lot of weight. He accepted that we must kill, eat, and use other beings to live, and argued only that we should do so with restraint and only for vital needs.

6. How Deep Ecology Shows Up in Practice¶

Deep ecology influenced, or overlaps heavily with, a number of ideas and practices:

• Wilderness preservation and rewilding: protecting large, connected habitats for their own sake. E.O. Wilson's Half-Earth proposal (2016), to set aside about half the planet for nature, is in a similar spirit, though Wilson argued from biodiversity science rather than deep ecology.
• Bioregionalism: organizing life and politics around watersheds and ecological regions rather than arbitrary borders.
• Rights of nature: giving legal standing to ecosystems. Examples include Ecuador's 2008 constitution, New Zealand's Whanganui River (2017), and in Canada, the Magpie River (Mutehekau Shipu) in Quebec, recognized as a legal person in 2021 by the Innu Council of Ekuanitshit and the Minganie regional municipality.
• Experiential practices: Joanna Macy and John Seed's Council of All Beings workshops, and Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings (Seed, Macy, Fleming, Næss, 1988), aimed at widening identification with the non-human world.
• Transpersonal ecology: Warwick Fox's development of the Self-realization idea (1990).
• Everyday stewardship: choices like replacing lawn with native plants, leaving habitat untidy for insects, or rearing monarchs aren't "deep ecology" by themselves. But they fit its emphasis on local, concrete action that grows out of care for particular places and creatures. See Native Pollinator Gardening, Danaus plexippus, and Turtles.

Some radical groups, most famously Earth First! (founded 1980), drew on deep ecology to justify direct action such as tree-sits and road blockades. Næss himself was committed to Gandhian non-violence and distanced the philosophy from sabotage and from misanthropic statements made by some activists.

7. Criticisms¶

Deep ecology has been heavily criticized, including by other environmentalists. The main lines of critique:

• Social ecology (Murray Bookchin): In 1987, Bookchin attacked deep ecology as mystical and dangerously vague, calling it "eco-la-la." He argued that ecological destruction comes from social hierarchy and capitalism. Blaming "humanity" in general erases the difference between a corporate executive and a poor farmer. He also pointed to misanthropic comments by some Earth First! figures about famine and disease as population control.
• The Global South critique (Ramachandra Guha): In an influential 1989 essay, the Indian historian argued that deep ecology's focus on wilderness reflected American concerns. Exporting it, in the form of national parks that evict rural and Indigenous people, harms the poor. The main problems in places like India, he said, are overconsumption by the rich and militarization, not a lack of biocentrism.
• Population: Points 4 and 6 call for a smaller human population without saying how. Critics worry this opens the door to coercive or racist population politics. Defenders reply that Næss meant very gradual, voluntary change over centuries, and that per-capita consumption in rich countries is equally targeted. The wider population-vs-consumption debate is covered in the Environmentalism guide.
• Ecofeminist critiques (Val Plumwood, Ariel Salleh, others): The problem isn't anthropocentrism in general but androcentrism and dualistic thinking (reason/nature, man/woman, mind/body). Also, expanding the "Self" to absorb nature can erase the real otherness of other beings instead of respecting them as different.
• Indigenous perspectives: Many Indigenous peoples held relational, non-anthropocentric views of land long before 1973. Some critics see deep ecology as repackaging or romanticizing those traditions, while it has historically supported a "pristine wilderness" ideal that leaves out the people who lived in and shaped those landscapes.
• Philosophical vagueness: "Intrinsic value," "vital needs," and "biospherical egalitarianism in principle" are hard to pin down, which makes the platform difficult to use when real interests conflict.
• Practicality: Ecomodernists and many policy-focused environmentalists argue that technology, economic incentives, and regulation (Næss's "shallow" approaches) have achieved the actual wins, such as ozone recovery, cleaner air, and cheap renewables. They see calls for a change in consciousness as unrealistic.

Some later writers on deep ecology accepted parts of these critiques. More recent work tries to combine its ecocentrism with social and environmental justice rather than treating them as rivals.

8. Deep Ecology Among Other Environmental Philosophies¶

For an overview of the full range of environmental strands, see Major Ideological Strands in the Environmentalism guide.

9. Further Reading¶

Primary sources

• Arne Næss, "The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement: A Summary," Inquiry 16 (1973). Short and the place to start.
• Arne Næss, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle (trans. David Rothenberg, 1989). His fullest statement of Ecosophy T.
• Arne Næss, The Ecology of Wisdom (ed. Alan Drengson & Bill Devall, 2008). An accessible collection of his essays.
• Bill Devall & George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered (1985)
• George Sessions (ed.), Deep Ecology for the 21st Century (1995). Includes the platform and many critiques and responses.

Developments

• John Seed, Joanna Macy, Pat Fleming & Arne Næss, Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings (1988)
• Warwick Fox, Toward a Transpersonal Ecology (1990)
• David Rothenberg, Is It Painful to Think? Conversations with Arne Næss (1993)

Critiques

• Murray Bookchin, "Social Ecology versus Deep Ecology" (1987)
• Ramachandra Guha, "Radical American Environmentalism and Wilderness Preservation: A Third World Critique," Environmental Ethics 11 (1989)
• Val Plumwood, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (1993)

Related

• Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (1949). See especially "The Land Ethic" and "Thinking Like a Mountain."
• Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass (2013). An Indigenous, relational view of land that overlaps with deep ecology in places and differs from it in others.
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Environmental Ethics

Næss's own advice was to treat deep ecology less as a set of answers than as an invitation: keep asking deeper questions, work out your own ecosophy, and act concretely and non-violently where you live.