Deep Ecology: Living As if Nature Mattered
by Geri Larkin • Eugene, OR

Here’s what we know: As a global civilization we seem to share this central belief in material progress which, in turn, causes all sorts of production—production of houses, of shoes, of cars, of televisions.
But, this production is cutting deeply into our natural resources and poisoning our environment with its waste products.

You know it. I know it. And I’m not even going to rant à la the comedian Dennis Miller about how the wealth that comes out of this production is increasingly concentrated in the countries which are already exceedingly wealthy relative to the rest of the planet. Or how, in our own country, it’s increasingly concentrated in the hands of five percent or so of our population.

I’ll leave the real ranting to you and people like poet Gary Snyder, a much more eloquent longtime student of Zen and nature: “The ‘free world’ has become economically dependent on a fantastic system of stimulation of greed which cannot be fulfilled, sexual desire which cannot be satiated, and hate which has no outlet except oneself, the persons one is supposed to love, or the revolutionary aspirations of pitiful, poverty-stricken marginal societies like Cuba or Vietnam”.

Others already do an outstanding job of ranting about how better than seventy-five percent of all Central American forests have been destroyed since 1975, in order to produce beef for export, while seventy percent of Central American children are undernourished. Dr. Helen Calicott has been showing us for years that while nuclear technology is indeed a threat to the air we all breathe, our food and water are fast becoming so polluted that the potential nuclear health hazard for each of us is child’s play in comparison.

The point is that as some of us go, all of us go, eventually. We are deeply connected to each other and to the earth, and every move we make has an impact on others, and the more we use has an impact on others. Some of us create a little dust in our wake, some of us create lots. All of the native traditions of which I am aware lived according to the truth of interconnections. As we start to actually experience changes in our own lives as a result of our own practice, we quickly discover the importance of understanding how deeply connected we are to one another and to the earth itself.

Why does this happen? Because clarity begets clarity and honesty begets honesty. As our spiritual chugging along opens us to personal truths, it is a natural progression to start to realize the truths of our wider community.

Arne Naess, the Norwegian philosopher who coined the term deep ecology in1973, talked about the connection between our spiritual work and nature: “The essence of deep ecology is to keep asking more searching questions about human life, society, and Nature as in the Western philosophical tradition of Socrates. . . . For example, we need to ask questions like, Why do we think that economic growth and high levels of consumption are so important? The conventional answer would be to point to the economic consequences of not having economic growth. But in deep ecology, we ask whether the present society fulfills basic human needs like love and security and access to nature and, in so doing, we question our society’s underlying assumptions. We ask which society, which education, which form of religion, is beneficial for all life on the planet as a whole, and then we ask further what we need to do in order to make the necessary changes” (Deep Ecology: Living as If Nature Mattered by Bill Devall and George Sessions).

There is a basic intuition in deep ecology that we have no right to destroy other living beings without sufficient reason. Another norm is that, with maturity, human beings will experience joy when other life-forms experience joy, and sorrow when other life-forms experience sorrow. Not only will we feel sad when our brother or cat feels sad, but we will grieve when all living beings, including landscapes, are destroyed.

Basic principles of deep ecology:

1. The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on earth have value in themselves. These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman 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. Because present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive, the situation is rapidly worsening. Policies which affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures must change.

5. The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living. There is a profound difference between big and great.

We don’t just care because we’re supposed to care, we care because we are a part of every single thing. So we become the tree huggers in Northern India, fighting the deforestation of the remaining woodlands. Or we become two nurses traveling among the coca-producing villages in Brazil, teaching farmers how to raise silkworms, and thereby creating an alternative to producing cocaine. Maybe we become technology executives with a focus on developing robust recycling systems for whole cities.

These actions grow out of a deep understanding that we are each part of a system where we depend on each other whether we like it or not. If one of us gets sick, all of us get sick. If one of us loses a child to starvation or a gang shooting, we all lose that child. We need to wake up from the delusion of separateness with its demand to defend our made-up boundaries and its belief that we can ultimately protect ourselves by building bigger and bigger walls between our own lives and the rest of the world. Our spiritual practice will give us the courage and the wisdom to do so.

Reprinted from Stumbling Towards Enlightenment by Geri Larkin. Front cover photo by Chantra Pramkaew.Copyright ©2008. Ten Speed Press, Berkeley, CA. www.tenspeed.com.

Geri Larkin founded the Still Point Zen Buddhist Temple in Detroit in 1999 & served as its guiding teacher until 2005. She has been a practicing Buddhist for 20 years & has written eleven books on Buddhism.