What is Deep Ecology?

Me, in awe of trees. Captured by my cousin in Wexford, Ireland, 2024

I realise I have mentioned Deep Ecology several times but never provided an explanation of what it actually is. Well, my friends, the time has come.  

The simplest way I can describe Deep Ecology is as the concept that humans are nature. We are not separate from or above nature, we are it.  

The dominant Western view over the last several thousand years has been anthropocentric, meaning human-centered. Whether we like it or not, it is baked into our psyches that humans we live at the top of the food chain. We’ve been taught to see ourselves as the strongest, most intelligent, most deserving species on the planet, with all else being subservient - cast aside as frills or fodder. To reiterate, this is the dominant culture in much of the world, but not all of it - a point which I’ll return to later.  

Deep Ecology, a term coined in 1973 by Norwegian philosopher, Arne Naess, urges us to remember that we are but a strand on the web of life, with all parts of nature making up an interconnected whole. Not only are we interconnected, but interdependent. As one strand on the web breaks, the structural integrity of the whole is compromised. Like a game of Jenga, if enough of us fall, we all tumble. This effect is already taking place, with insects in severe decline.

Ok, so we’re dependent on nature, that seems easy enough to understand. But the fact that we are nature? Seems a stretch, but allow me to explain…

A (very) brief history of our home: Billions of years ago, the stars exploded and released several elements into space (you know, the ones on the periodic table), forming the universe and all of the planets. At first, Earth was just a giant, blazing ball of lava, but, over (an exceptionally long) time, the elements continously transformed, dissolved and returned anew, evolving to become single celled organisms, marine sea creatures, reptiles and, eventually, mammals (that’s us).

“The earth was once molten rock and now sings opera”
- Brian Swimme

Matter cannot be destroyed, it merely changes form. So the same atoms and molecules that were flying around eons ago, are now moonlighting as the flesh, bones and tendons that piece together to make these meat suits we call our bodies. Those very same atoms and molecules, that have experienced the very same cycles of birth, death and re-birth, make up everything we can see in nature, from a frog to an elephant, a tree to a stone, a speck of dust to a twinkling star - every time, without fail.

With this in mind, there can be no doubt. I am you and you are me. We are all one.

These days, we’re far too busy to remember this astonishing truth and so we drift through life under a spell, known as the “illusion of separation”, which is the false belief that we’re independent from and superior to all other life on earth. This, I believe - and Deep Ecology affirms - is the root of our suffering.

“[We must] address the underlying psychological or spiritual disease that allows modern humans to imagine that we can profit from the destruction of our own life support systems”
- John Seed

It is what’s caused us to rape, pillage and plunder the earth for personal gain. It’s allowed us to slaughter our animal kin without a care. It’s forced us into systems built around individualism, competition and social inequality. It’s driven us to commit war, genocide and endless atrocities against our brothers and sisters. It’s left us with gaping holes in our hearts where connection and belonging used to live, but that now we attempt to fill with consumerism or the worship of false prophets.

This severance from the whole - this desecration of our own self manifest in myriad forms - makes us so desperately melancholy that we seek to numb, distract and medicate ourselves so as not to be utterly subsumed by the pain of our self-annihilation.

So, Deep Ecology seeks to heal the fragmentation that exists within…but how? This is where I believe Deep Ecology truly differentiates itself. Næss argued that it is not enough to hold “ecological ideas”; we must cultivate an “ecological identity” or “ecological self.” He suggested that our understanding of interconnectedness must transcend the mind and become a lived, felt experience in the body, and that embodiment can be achieved through “community therapies.”

“Care flows naturally if the self is widened and deepened so that protection of free nature is felt and conceived of as protection
of our very selves.”
- Arne Naess

Enter: The Work that Reconnects (WTR). If Deep Ecology calls for community therapies, then WTR is the answer to that prayer. The potency, brilliance and magic of this work is too great to explain here, so I will save it for the next post.

However, I wanted to circle back to something I touched on at the beginning. It is primarily the dominant modern overculture (also known as WEIRD society - Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic…though Democratic is debatable these days), that suffer from the illusion of separation. Many Indigenous communities around the world never forgot this way of life, and still recognise its interconnectedness today. While some white guy coined the term, he did not invent its truth.

In fact, if you go back far enough, all of our ancestors once lived this way; it’s just the way things were. To live in reciprocity with the land, to render gratitude for its offerings, to recognise the animacy that courses through all living things…this is not something new we need to learn; it is simply something ancient we are being asked to remember.  

"When the blood in your veins returns to the sea, and the earth in your bones returns to the ground, perhaps then you will remember that this land does not belong to you, it is you who belongs to this land"
— Original source unknown, but it’s believed to
derive from Native American peoples