The man now considered the founder of this decidedly post-Western world view was the naturalist Aldo Leopold(1887-1948), a Wisconsin park ranger without much formal education who spent his time writing nature essays. That's him in the photo. The best of these were collected after his death as The Sand County Almanac (1949) - like all respectable founders of new faiths, he died a martyr, fighting a forest fire. This book is now the holy scripture of the deep ecology movement. (I am using religious terminology for a good reason, as you will see.) The most important essay in the book is a short appendix entitled "The Land Ethic," and the key sentence is this: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." ("biotic community" is 1940s language for "ecosystem.") Think about this sentence before you continue: can you see why it is a profoundly new and radical definition of right and wrong? Click on the following link to read the essay, somewhat abridged by me. Essay - The Land Ethic But Leopold was not an academic philosopher, and it took a few more decades until his ideas were developed into a real system. The term "deep ecology" was invented by Norwegian philosopher Arne Næss (1912-2009) in a 1972 article, in which he suggested that all existing approaches to the environmental crisis were "shallow" because they did not get at the social and psychological roots of our attitude towards nature. You will read more about and by Næss below, but here is the gist of his new philosophy: 1. Nearly all our thinking is "anthropocentric," or centered on human needs and desires; what we need to become is "biocentric," to think in terms of what is good for all life, not just for our own selfish species. (A better term now in use is "ecocentric," because it takes in the whole ecosystem, not just the "bio" part of it). 2. Our inability to connect with and really understand nature comes from a false definition of the "self." Is my "self" just what is contained inside my skin? Of course not, because I am constantly interchanging matter and energy with my environment, as part of vast cycles within cycles that ultimately involve the entire planet. I need to find some way to identify with the living planet (Næss suggests going alone into the wilderness to meditate and live off the land). If I can accomplish this identification, I will have "Self-realization" (with a capital S, to differentiate it from the lower-case "self" which is merely "me" as traditionally defined). Click on the following link to view a reading from Naess. (That's him in the photo, not long before he died in 2009 at age 96.) · Naess Reading - Deep Ecology As another option you can look at this article by Alan Drengson, which is more recent and comprehensive but also has more philosophical jargon. Click on the following link to learn more. · Drengson Article - Overview of Ecophilosophy The ideas of Arn ...