Arne Naess
1912–2009
Naess coined “deep ecology” in 1973 to name a question most environmentalism doesn’t ask: not how to manage resources better, but whether the whole frame of resources is the problem.
Shallow and Deep
His 1973 essay “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement” split environmentalism into two currents. Shallow ecology fights pollution and depletion for the sake of human health and affluence — real work, but work that leaves the underlying premise untouched: nature exists for us. Deep ecology questions that premise directly, arguing for the intrinsic value of all living things regardless of their usefulness to humans.
Naess called his own worldview an “ecosophy” — not a single doctrine but a personal, examined relationship between philosophy and practice, different for every person who built one. He was a mountaineer as much as a philosopher, and his sense of “life is fundamentally one” came as much from decades in the Norwegian mountains as from Spinoza, whom he studied closely.
The Bookchin Feud
Murray Bookchin attacked deep ecology as mystification — a philosophy that blames “humanity in general” for ecological crisis while ignoring the specific social hierarchies (capitalism, the state, patriarchy) that actually drive extraction. Bookchin and deep ecology’s defenders argued publicly in the late 1980s. Neither fully won. Bookchin was right that “humans are the problem” can excuse the powerful as easily as it indicts them. Naess was right that a purely social diagnosis can still leave the assumption of human entitlement to nature unexamined.
Key Works
- “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement” (1973)
- Ecology, Community and Lifestyle (1989)
Connections
- deep-ecology — the movement he founded
- bookchin — his sharpest critic
- sumak-kawsay — a parallel claim from a different tradition
- reciprocity-with-land — the practice this philosophy points toward
Not every relationship to land is instrumental. Some of it just is.