Deep ecology is an interesting philosophy. Not necessarily because it is new - no, the underlying sensibility seems to be part of an ancient pattern: the visceral widening out of ideological awareness that occurs when a culture becomes too self-referential and fragmented - but because of its timeliness and appropriateness, nicely reconstituted in contemporary scientific, ecological, systems, metaphysical, and even spiritual language.
Of course, there are problems with the philosophy, like there is with every pure idea whose physical manifestation becomes large enough to be strongly magnetic. It pulls in the misanthropic type, you know, the kind that think that the entire concept of civilization itself is to blame, and that humanity is some failed species that has become a cancerous entity in relation to the planet. Of course, this could very well be an accurate conclusion, but perhaps it is not quite the right time to throw in the towel? I mean, until the Great Ball of Fire arises that is to devour us all, and we must find a way to ideologically come to terms with such an outcome, why promote an ideology that implicates oneself as some form of cancer?
If you really think your species is a cancer, why not simply kill yourself? How does cancer, upon self and cosmic awareness, reconcile itself and its ongoing existence? I don't ask this to be cruel. I'm genuinely curious about the answer to such a question. Perhaps the contention is that our mode of organization and production is what gives rise to these cancerous effects, and that it is completely logical for individual humans themselves to promote such an ideology without implicating themselves as some sort of metaphysically monstrous entity.
It is still a dangerous ideology to promote. Who then becomes designated as the cancer? The purveyors and participants in this global capitalist system? What then, do you propose to do at that point? Structurally it seems dangerously close to a form of fascism: a mode of ideological thought that posits some sort of impurity that must be jettisoned.
However I digress. This is simply an extreme outlying faction of the deep ecology movement, and maybe I don't even fully understand the arguments. The greater movement is indeed a timely and appropriate phenomenon.
Its principles raise other less grand questions. For example, the flies outside my house are somewhat annoying and trigger a mild disgust response. They land in the cat food to eat and I wonder, should I shoo them? Or let them eat? Will they lay maggots? Will it hurt the cat? Or maybe she will lose her appetite herself anyways.
The discomfort becomes even more pronounced when they are inside the house. By god! Foreign creature in the living zone! But where most people pick up a fly swatter or a can of Raid, I just let them fly around and hope that left to their own devices, they carry out whatever purpose they will: they'll leave because they need food or they'll die off at some point, which upon thinking about, I sometimes try to shoo them towards an open door or window, or catch them in a box or container to take outside.
Moreover, it is ill-advised to simply destroy or displace every little thing that seems out of place.What purpose do these flies serve, given the context? Maybe it is nice that they are around, gobbling up excess wastes and doing their ecological...things. Perhaps spiders eat them, which helps them survive and eat other pests like fleas or ticks which are carrying pathogens. There's much more that goes on that you become aware of when you study the science.
There is still a tension between human beings and the environment. Or rather, there is a strange tension between the sharing of all living things of energy, seeing as how some evolve to employ methodologies that are in conflict with the methodologies of others. For example, carnivores and even herbivores have evolved to devour entire living systems and absorb their energy. Or pathogens like viruses and certain bacteria have evolved to actually live off of energies that are taken away from the hosts that they infect.
So, one can't simply go outside and sit in filth, and throw feces about and live with flies and maggots and say, "Yes it is all good! Rejoice in the world!" One should expect to die promptly in a week or so, however long it takes. There is a reason for many of our instinctual responses and disgust reflexes, or even our higher-developed cultural standards: our treatment of wastes, whether artificial or biological, ward off many types of disease and dysfunction for example.
But this is made more complicated by the fact that some of it is artificial too. Our culture, at its advanced stages, seeks to radically separate itself from the rest of the living tissue. We recoil from much of life itself: landscapes of concrete and metal and glass, sealed off, air-conditioned compartments full of fabrics and leathers and paints and wood, all materials amputated from living systems, their original meaning abstracted away by the labyrinthine industrial processes they went through to become something else.
This doesn't just encourage certain system-wide biological changes in ourselves, but the daily psychological way in which we interact with the world, and the way in which we are aware of vast, interconnected processes that sustain us daily.
So then what would a deep ecologist say about not just Raiding or swatting flies, but the very structure of the house I'm in, and the corresponding dynamics that arise in the interactions between such a structure and the surrounding environment, or better, the structure and corresponding environmental dynamics of the greater pattern of human habitation that characterizes the modern world?
Awareness is constricted within increasingly baroque abstractions that become separate from the environment that they emanate from, by virtue of the fact that there is just simply too much information to take in, given the complexity of how everything interacts. Mainstream scientists trying to work within the industrial paradigm will say: well the data doesn't provide a definite conclusion, while completely ignoring that all of the data is coming from a closed system that they are trying to study on its own, whereas scientists with deep ecology sensibilities are becoming aware of a greater set of interconnecting systems that expands out far beyond what we have been collectively aware of for centuries, turning to these greater systems for the data.
Well, and the data, the good data anyways, as far as I'm concerned, is saying that we need to change radically. Communication is especially important in this regard. To change, you have to know what direction you should change towards. You have to be informed. It takes scientific and philosophical literacy for such things. But it also takes philosophical and even spiritual literacy on the part of the scientists themselves. It is a transformation that has to take place with an incredible presence of mutuality, an unconditional respect for the other, a respect that should then wash back onto you.
