On the Enduring Importance of Deep Ecology

Abstract

It is common to hear that deep ecology "has reached its logical conclusion and exhausted itself" in a vacuous anthropomorphism and absurd nonanthropocentrism. These conclusions should be rejected. Properly understood, neither objection poses a serious problem for deep ecology so much as for the ethic of "ecological holism" which some philosophers - wrongly - have taken to arise from deep ecology. Deep ecology is not such an ethic, but is best understood as an aesthetically articulated conception of what, following Robinson Jeffers, may be called "Wild Mind," and such a Wild Mind is characterized - not criticized and condemned - by just that anthropomorphism and nonanthropocentrism critics focus on when they attack the ethic of ecological holism.