University Clinical Teachers

Deep Ecology, the Holistic Critique of Enlightenment Dualism, and the Irony of History

“…Importantly, even though many leftists and some liberals had since the French Revolution opposed exploitation by working to establish deontological institutions that could rein-in industrial capitalist excesses -Social Democrats infiltrating the state to erect institutional bulwarks against markets, and Liberal Democrats seeking to protect the individual from arbitrary incursions upon atomist liberty by the collective, for example -deep ecology asserted that 'the system' which this Old Left took for granted was structured to produce falseness. And, that the Old Left's one-dimensional pursuit of economic-redistributive goals through political institutions also served as a barrier to the 'idiosyncratic selfrealisation' and 'non-conformity' that, once unleashed, would foster ecological equilibrium (Naess, 1993: 204;Leopold 1966Leopold [1949: 187; see also Hay, 2002;Snyder, 1990).…”

“…Alternately, the ecosphere should be regarded as a whole nexus of being, the functioning of which cannot accurately or acceptably be understood in terms of its component parts only, if it can be understood in its entirety at all (Light and Rolston III, 2003). For others, holism implies a land ethic that extends the 'boundaries of the [moral] community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals; or, collectively, the land' (Leopold, 1966(Leopold, [1949: 204, see also Callicott, 1989Callicott, , 1999Nash, 1987).…”

“…2 In the wake of recent suggestions by some of its proponents that deep ecology is a 'spent force' (Kowalsky, 2014: 95), I use a critical realist approach to highlight an interesting historical coincidence. Deep ecology's radical 3 normative project of promoting holism and concomitant ethic of moral voluntarism in the 1970s -'a philosophy of ecological harmony or equilibrium' (Naess, 1973: 100) supported by an 'ecological consciousness' (Devall and Sessions, 1985: 65) and based on 'idiosyncratic self-realisation' (Naess, 1993: 204) and 'non-conformity' (Leopold 1966(Leopold [1949: 187, see also Hay, 2002;Snyder, 1990) -has ironically, 4 in recent years been taken up by some very influential corporate and policy advocacy groups. In contrast to the deep ecologists, however, these actors appear at least equally committed to upholding, rather than radically critiquing, political-economic structures that perpetuate environmental and human exploitation and in many cases, specific instances of rent-seeking, privatisation and reducing incomes of the poor.…”