Shallow or Deep Ecology?

Some of you may be familiar with the finer aspects of the philosophies of environmentalism; others, maybe not so much. If you find yourself in the latter category, this post may be helpful.

That might sound a bit arrogant, but I promise, it’s not, because I’m not going to write the main of this post. Instead, I’m going to copy and paste some posts that I’ve made recently on another cool blog, Media and the Environment.

Ultimately, I disagreed with my fellow blogger, Lauren Keith. I want to say, of course, that I respect her a great deal; it seems pretty evident to me from reading her posts that she’s a dedicated environmentalist. But it’s also evident that she and I disagree philosophically in our approaches to environmentalism. And that’s fine, and even useful, because I think our replies to each other are sort of indicative of the dialogue that’s happening between environmentalists right now.

So, without further ado, here’s the link to the blog post itself.

The debate essentially centers around a single question: how should environmentalism approach the general public? Lauren states that:

I don’t shop at The Merc to save the polar bears. I don’t make my roommates unplug the microwave (and soon the refrigerator, they joke) because the glaciers are melting. I do it so we can save ourselves.

This is the main point of hers with which I found I disagreed. To her credit, she states later:

It saddens me that a more expensive case of Bud Select has my friends more worried about the state of the environment than a carbon dioxide graph did, but I’m ready to meet them where they are: at the grocery store.

Essentially, she’s suggesting that environmentalism appeal to people’s sense of selfishness in order to get them to live a more sustainable lifestyle. For Lauren and many environmentalists in her camp, we need to bring the dialogue to the people, and not the other way around. Of course, this argument has many merits: such a strategy would be palatable to the population at large, and would be fairly effective fairly quickly. It makes the most sense in our unreflective society. Lauren wrote:

Because most of us don’t see polar bears, the ice caps, the Amazon and many other environmental jewels on this planet, they lose relevance to the average person when he goes to the grocery store and is trying to decide between buying traditional or buying organic.

That’s why I think we environmentalists need to rethink how we approach people and spread the message about saving the planet. Not everyone is going to care about polar bears or biodiversity loss, but they are going to care about themselves, their communities and future generations.

She’s right there; most people don’t really extend their ethic to include the planet. She’s also right that seducing people with economics would be an efficient way to change things for the better.\

But I vehemently disagree with this position because I think it does nothing to solve the deeper problems inherent in our social structure, the deeper problems that are truly causing environmental degradation. Generally, this sort of thinking is labeled “deep ecology,” a term coined by the philosopher Arne Naess. After she more fully explained herself in another comment, I wrote in my response:

Environmentalism is, at its core, a path that asks humans to extend their notions of being towards other organisms other than themselves. Polar bears and glaciers and mountains, valleys and streams and bald eagles, wheat and cows and fishes, all of these interact with us. All of them leave a distinct, important mark on our very being. We participate in the objects of our perception, as they say.

And once we begin to realize our individuality is not inherent, but rather, the result of relationships (thus, ultimately, something not our own), I think we’ll be much the better. Saying that we need to help the environment to help ourselves is not going to bring us farther down that path.

I think it’s pretty easy to see the polarity, now: some environmentalists focus on the “issues,” while others focus on the “problems.” That language is credited to Neil Evernden, a famous deep ecologist, who suggested that things such as pollution or climate change are the “issues” that result from deeper misconceptions of self and place, which are called “problems.” Evernden (I think I may have mentioned him in another blog, but I can’t remember) maintains that environmentalism is becoming weaker because it is starting to become mainstreamed. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not so idealistic that I can’t accept anything but a perfect victory. I understand compromises need be made. But I don’t think those compromises should come from the core of environmental philosophy; they should be political concessions, legal concessions, technological concessions. In other words, concede some of the “issues,” but never lose ground on the “problems.”

Lauren responded to my post by stating:

How long did it take you to make the connections between humans and their impact on the environment and the realization of the importance of nature? It’s taken me three years, and I don’t think I’m full-fledged yet.

So how can we expect people who don’t care about the environment to suddenly wake up and reduce their ecological footprints, stop reproducing (as much), stop consuming, etc.?

That’s where we need to rethink the connections that we are drawing and whether we’ve even done a good job drawing them. I can tell my friends all about Kansas bees dying or how much the aquifer has been drained, but until I make it relevant to them (explaining how there will be less food if there are no bees and no water), then they will finally be engaged in the conversation and start to relate to nature.

Environmentalists should stop driving on the greener-than-thou road. It’s no wonder people aren’t following us. We need to meet people where they are and take them on the same journey that we’ve already taken.

Again, we differ here. The paths we’ve gone down, to use Lauren’s language, are not just ones of lifestyle choice, of choosing to ride the bus instead of drive, of recycling and composting instead of simply throwing our stuff in the landfill. The paths environmentalists should be going down are paths that fundamentally restructure our notions of being, place, and ethics in order to conform them with a more sustainable way of being. In other words, environmentalists should not be preaching the gospel of commerce and economics as the solutions to our “problems,” but criticizing the attitudes that result from these forces, the attitudes that are directly responsible for the “issues” at hand.

Creating price incentives will help solve “issues,” but will not solve “problems;” demanding that people run around in a Prius instead of a Hummer will help solve “issues,” but will not solve “problems;” appealing to people’s sense of greed and ambition will help solve “issues,” but will not solve problems. Is it valuable that we do these things? Yes, insofar as we solve the issues, they are valuable.

But if they come at the cost of solving a “problem,” they simply are not. Encouraging greed, using greed, will ultimately do nothing for this planet, and that’s what it really comes down to.