DEEP ECOLOGY IS NOT THE BEST WAY TO PRESERVE THE ENVIRONMENT

DEEP ECOLOGY IS NOT THE BEST WAY TO PRESERVE THE ENVIRONMENT

1. DEEP ECOLOGY WOULD NOT PRESERVE THE ENVIRONMENT

Martin Lewis, Professor of Environmental Studies, Duke University, GREEN DELUSIONS, 1992, p. 73.

As the preceding discussion shows, small‑scale societies practicing swidden and other forms of extensive cultivation do not necessarily exist in the social and ecological idyll imagined for them by deep ecologists. it remains true, however, that most of these groups cause relatively little environmental degradation. Yet such benign interactions with nature are often a function more of their low population densities rather than of their special affinity with the natural world. As population density increases, tribal cultivation usually begins to extract a more substantial environmental toll. Intensive Agriculture in Small‑Scale Societies: Many small‑scale societies, it must be said, do maintain low population densities over long periods, thereby presenting modest environmental threats. Others grow steadily but avoid degrading their farmlands by devising more intensive cultivation systems that obviate the need for long term fallow (Boserup 196 5). Permanent cropping, however, almost invariably demands fertilization, hence heavy applications of labor. Whatever primal affluence certain swidden cultivators may have enjoyed vanishes once their populations grow too large for forest farming to support. But even if they have successfully intensified production, tribal and peasant societies characterized by permanent‑field agriculture detract from nature in other ways. True, many do devise sophisticated farming techniques that maintain high productivity levels over many generations. But often a creeping level of deterioration is still evident. As nutrients are slowly extracted from forests and meadows, in the form of ash, leaf mulch, and "green manure," in order to subsidize fields, uncropped areas may be gradually impoverished. The stunted forestlands of Korea and much of southern China, for example, may owe their degraded state in part to an imperceptibly slow leakage of nutrients to the cultivated fields. As Peter Perdue (1987:35, 247) shows, peasants in south central China burned entire forests in order to sell the fertilizing ash in downstream areas, a process that contributed directly to what he aptly calls the "exhausting" of the earth.

Jerry A. Stark Professor of Sociology, University of Wisconsin, Director, University Scholars Program and University Learning Community, Ecological Resistance Movements, 1995, p. 269

The deep ecology platform presented above is, essentially, a series of claims about what is right and what is wrong, from the first proposition about the intrinsic value of nature to the last statement about the obligations of those who accept this platform. However, a painfully obvious problem emerges. Having rejected the rational foundations of philosophical reasoning, how is it possible that advocates of deep ecology presume to formulate an ethic for environmentally acceptable conduct? If all knowledge is based upon intuitions derived from a “reimmersion of humans in nature”, who is to say that two or more people will share the same intuitions? Who can argue reasonably that “the equal right to live and blossom is an intuitively obvious value axiom” when someone else simply disagrees? Rather than reviewing the troublesome notion that nature has ‘intrinsic value’, I will simply ask the question: How would we know? Intuitionism cannot reasonably address this question. It can only reformulate it as a condition of belief—either we believe in the platform of deep ecology, or we do not.
3. DEEP ECOLOGY OFFERS NO GUIDANCE TO POLITICAL PRACTICE

Jerry A. Stark Professor of Sociology, University of Wisconsin, Director, University Scholars Program and University Learning Community, Ecological Resistance Movements, 1995, p. 273

Finally, there remains the question of political practices derivable from deep ecology. Dobson is essentially correct that one problem of deep ecology is that it is so vague and spiritually oriented that it offers no guidance to political practice. Another way of saying this is that there is no political strategy that deep ecology excludes. This accounts for the confusing array of political recommendations from Naess's insistence upon a Gandhian nonviolent strategy, to calls for ecotage, to quests for personal empowerment through "right action ... words, acts and feelings true to our intuitions and principles". A philosophy that includes all political strategies excludes nothing and necessarily provides no guidance to activists engaged in the development of alternative communities and political action.

DEEP ECOLOGY OPPRESSES HUMANS

1. DEEP ECOLOGICAL COMMUNITIES DENY HUMAN RIGHTS

Jerry A. Stark Professor of Sociology, University of Wisconsin, Director, University Scholars Program and University Learning Community, Ecological Resistance Movements, 1995, p. 273

The only guarantee that individual interests will be honored in this type of community lies in an unquestioned acceptance of one person's definition of everyone's interests, which Implies a rather extensive control over the process of socialization and interaction . This type of community cannot be based on any conceptions of rights or responsibilities, for both require a framework of law and institutions in which those rights can be defined, delineated, and defended both against the encroachment of others and against unintended effects of community practices and policies. As one author correctly observes, "Moral persuasion per se lacks any spontaneous, decentralized coordinating device. If elements of other decentralized social choice mechanisms cannot be trusted to perform the coordinating function, then the burden falls ineluctably upon centralized devices. Such devices may be imposed from above or, developed ‘spontaneously' from below". This institutional arrangement is what we call "government," and it is precisely what postmodern environmentalists reject, at the level of philosophical reasoning, as an illegitimate and unsustainable form of political structure. Deep ecologists prefer natural, spiritual communities which are as decentralized and autonomous is possible. However, a spiritual community, apart from any legal or. constitutional guarantees, is " unlikely to protect the so‑called rights or values of nature as it is ‑to protect the rights of individuals. As Bookchin and Bradford make clear, deep ecologists tend to assume that human rights have already been fully established and that the only rights remaining are those of nature itself. Thus it is easier to disregard the human impact of community organization in their philosophy.

Jerry A. Stark Professor of Sociology, University of Wisconsin, Director, University Scholars Program and University Learning Community, Ecological Resistance Movements, 1995, p. 276

Aside from deep ecological assertions to the contrary, there is no reason whatsoever in deep ecosophy that two or more people should share the same intuitions of nature. Yet this is necessary to the formation of a community based upon common spiritual vision. Even if a group of people did share a common spiritual vision, there is little in the history of politics or religion to assure one that a community united around a spiritual vision would necessarily be a community based upon egalitarianism.' Far from it, utopian spiritual communities tend to be based upon a clear spiritual hierarchy between a dominant charismatic leader and a group of adherents 'who subordinate their thoughts and conduct to that leader. duBois argues that a postmodern philosophy based in "deep ethical concern" and an ontological identification with nature lends itself ,very nicely to the purposes of a status‑based, caste‑like social formation in which there is a rigid distinction between those who know truth as a matter of spiritual reflection [self‑realization] and the rest of the community who can only act out revealed truths. Romantic appeals to native American tribalism exacerbate this problem.
3. DEEP ECOLOGY IS ANTI-HUMAN.

Murray Bookchin, Founder of the Institute for Social Ecology, REMAKING SOCIETY, 1990, p. 11-12.

What renders this new “biocentrism,” with its antihumanistic image of human beings as interchangeable with rodents or ants, so insidious is that it now forms the premise of a growing movement called “deep ecology.” “Deep ecology” was spawned among well-to-do people who have been raised on a spiritual diet of Eastern cults mixed with Hollywood and Disneyland fantasies. The American mind is formless enough without burdening it with “biocentric” myths of a Buddhist and Taoist belief in a universal “oneness” so cosmic that human beings with all their distinctiveness dissolve into an all-encompassing form of “biocentric equality.” Reduced to merely one life-form among many, the poor and the impoverished either become fair game for outright extermination if they are socially expendable, or they become objects of brutal exploitation if they can be used to aggrandize the corporate world. Accordingly, terms like “oneness” and a “biocentric democracy” go hand-in-hand with a pious formula for human oppression, misery, and even extermination.