Socio-ethical tradition
"Turning my back on modern agriculture on one side and modern industry on the other, I climbed past the snowline for the ascent of Moelwyn Mawr. The first snow of the year, which lay deep and crisp, covered the tracks of summer hikers and the fissures of frost-broken rock. The place seemed utterly pure and pristine. The air was sharp and bracing. Swirls of mist passed over me, hiding the winter sun, cutting me off from all except the rolling expanse of white snow around. As I placed one foot after the other in the crisp snow, my head emptied of the chatter of the valley and the petty daily worries. I felt one with the white mountain which stood like an old man who had taken many knocks but still maintained his integrity.
But as I neared the summit, I suddenly felt strangely melancholy. However much I tried, I could not prevent the stark truth invading my mind. The snow around me was not pure and pristine; it was made from acid rain and was contaminated with radioactivity. The air was not clean; it contained an artificial excess of hydrocarbons. A man-made layer of carbon dioxide lay between me and the sun, inexorably heating up the globe. In a hundred years, there might not be any more snow falling on this mountain. Nature, in the sense of the world independent of man, has come to an end. The human species, which has sought to climb the highest mountains and to dive into the deepest seas, has so dominated nature that it has begun to transform it irredeemably.
At the top of the mountain, a few crows had left their mark in the snow. As if to confirm my gloomiest thoughts, a red fighter aeroplane roared low up the valley below, practising no doubt with dummy nuclear weapons.
Beneath its surface beauty, nature has become scarred and poisoned. God, if he ever existed, is dead, and only the faintest glimpse of Wordsworth's 'mighty Mind' can be discerned in the roar of the mountain torrents and the whistling wind of the peaks".
Peter Marshall; Nature's Web (1992)

Evolution
Organic evolution is a process entirely materialistic in its origin and operation, although no explicit conclusion was made or considered possible as to the origin of the laws and properties of matter in general under which organic evolution operates. Life is materialistic in nature, but it has properties unique to itself which reside in its organization, not in its materials or mechanics. Man arose as a result of the operation of organic evolution and his being and activities are also materialistic, but the human species has properties unique to itself among all forms of life, superadded to the properties unique to life among all forms of matter and of action. Man's intellectual, social, and spiritual natures are altogether exceptional among animals in degree, but they arose by organic evolution. They usher in a new phase of evolution, and not a new phase merely but also a new kind, which is thus also a product of organic evolution and can be no less materialistic in its essence even though its organization and activities are essentially different from those in the process that brought it into being.
It has also been shown that purpose and plan are not characteristic of organic evolution and are not a key to any of its operations. But purpose and plan are characteristic in social evolution, because man has purposes and he makes plans. Here purpose and plan do definitely enter into evolution, as a result and not as a cause of the processes seen in the long history of life. The purposes and plans are ours, not those of the universe, which displays convincing evidence of their absence.
Man was certainly not the goal of evolution, which evidently had no goal. He was not planned, in an operation wholly planless. He is not the ultimate in a single constant trend toward higher things, in a history of life with innumerable trends, none of them constant, and some toward the lower rather than the higher. Is his place in nature, then, that of a mere accident, without significance? The affirmative answer that some have felt constrained to give is another example of the "nothing but" fallacy. The situation is as badly misrepresented and the lesson as poorly learned when man is considered nothing but an accident as when he is considered as the destined crown of creation. His rise was neither insignificant nor inevitable. Man did originate after a tremendously long sequence of events in which both chance and orientation played a part. Not all the chance favored his appearance, none might have, but enough did.
Not all the orientation was in his direction, it did not lead unerringly human-ward, but some of it came this way. The result is the most highly endowed organization of matter that has yet appeared on the earth—and we certainly have no good reason to believe there is any higher in the universe. To think that this result is insignificant would be unworthy of that high endowment, which includes among its riches a sense of values.
that show progress in this respect, the line leading to man reaches much the highest level yet developed. By most other criteria of progress, also, man is at least among the higher animals and a balance of considerations fully warrants considering him definitely the highest of all.
Man is the result of a purposeless and materialistic process that did not have him in mind. He was not planned. He is a state of matter, a form of life, a sort of animal, and a species of the Order Primates, akin nearly or remotely to all of life and indeed to all that is material. It is, however, a gross misrepresentation to say that he is just an accident or nothing but an animal. Among all the myriad forms of matter and of life on the earth, or as far as we know in the universe, man is unique. He happens to represent the highest form of organization of matter and energy that has ever appeared. Recognition of this kinship with the rest of the universe is necessary for understanding him, but his essential nature is defined by qualities found nowhere else, not by those he has in common with apes, fishes, trees, fire, or anything other than himself.
It is part of this unique status that in man a new form of evolution begins, overlying and largely dominating the old, organic evolution which nevertheless also continues in him. This new form of evolution works in the social structure, as the old evolution does in the breeding population structure, and it depends on learning, the inheritance of knowledge, as the old does on physical inheritance. Its possibility arises from man's intelligence and associated flexibility of response. His reactions depend far less than other organisms' on physically inherited factors, far more on learning and on perception of immediate and of new situations.
Discovery that the universe apart from man or before his coming lacks and lacked any purpose or plan has the inevitable corollary that the workings of the universe cannot provide any automatic, universal, eternal, or absolute ethical criteria of right and wrong. This discovery has completely undermined all older attempts to find an intuitive ethic or to accept such an ethic as revelation. It has not been so generally recognised that it equally undermines attempts to find a naturalistic ethic which will flow with absolute validity from the workings of Nature or of Evolution as a new Revelation. Such attempts, arising from discovery of the baselessness of intuitive ethics, have commonly fallen into the same mistake of seeking an absolute ethic or one outside of man's own nature and have then been doomed to failure by their own premises.
The ethical need is within and peculiar to man, and its fulfillment also lies in man's nature, relative to him and to his evolution, not external or unchanging. Man has choice and responsibility, and in this matter, too, he must choose and he cannot place responsibility for Tightness and wrongness on God or on nature.
According to the the palaeontologist George Gaylord Simpson, the fact of responsibility and the ethic of knowledge have many ethical corollaries, among them that blind faith ("blind," or "unreasoning," to be emphasized) is morally wrong. In connection with high individualisation, another human diagnostic character, the resulting ethics include the goodness of maintenance of this individualisation and promotion of the integrity and dignity of the individual. Socialisation, a necessary human process, may be good or bad. When ethically good, it is based on and in turn gives maximum total possibility for ethically good individualization.
Such ethics have wide applications in social and personal conduct. They stand in strong opposition to authoritarian or totalitarian ideologies. They confirm the existence of many evils in current democracies, but the good state, on these principles, would inevitably be a democracy. The principles do not label every human action as good or bad —to do this would violate the prior conclusion that valid ethics cannot be absolute. Moreover, individual variability and flexibility are in themselves desirable, from the point of view both of ethics and of evolution, biological and social.
There remain mysteries deeper still, unplumbed by paleontology or any other science. The boundaries of what can be achieved by perception and by reason are respected. The present chaotic stage of humanity is not, as some wishfully maintain, caused by lack of faith but by too much unreasoning faith and too many conflicting faiths within these boundaries where such faith should have no place. The chaos is one that only responsible human knowledge can reduce to order.
It is another unique quality of man that he, for the first time in the history of life, has increasing power to choose his course and to influence his own future evolution. It would be rash, indeed, to attempt to predict his choice. The possibility of choice can be shown to exist. This makes rational the hope that choice may sometime lead to what is good and right for man. Responsibility for defining and for seeking that end belongs to all of us.

Ecosystems
Taking life within ecosystems to be a fundamental metaphor for all nature suggests interdependence, rather than domination, as a norm for all relations. Ecosystems abound in co- operation and symbiosis, as well as competition and conflict. There is a logical viewpoint by which relations involving dominance are in fact one type of interdependency.
One of the earliest scientific observations about ecology was made in 1721 by Richard Bradley, who wrote: 'All Bodies have some Dependence upon one another and . . . every distinct Part of Nature's work is necessary for the support of the rest; and ... if any one was wanting all the rest must be consequently out of order'.1 Nevertheless, ecology as a science did not emerge until the latter part of the ninteteenth century. The term 'ecology' was adopted by the scientific community after the International Botanical Congress in 1893.
From the beginning it was closely linked with ethology, the study of animal behaviour in its environment. By the end of the century, however, the term began to be applied to a wide variety of fields. Holistically minded biologists showed that man and animals were living interdependently in a balanced environment. The physical sciences warned that the dissipation of energy might threaten human existence and the very life of the planet. Then geographers drew attention to the finite and fragile nature of land. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the scientific scope of the term 'ecology' had largely been set.
The most important cultural revolution in the twentieth century has been the transference of the insights of ecology from the scientific to the moral and political field, and the recognition that they cannot be kept separate. Ecology in a broad sense assumes that humans and nonhumans are comparable, and then applies observations about nature to human societies. It is therefore used both in a descriptive and a normative way to suggest how we ought to act.
Earlier in the century, professional ecologists like Charles Elton defined ecology as no more than scientific natural history. A new breed of ecologists described their phenomena in quantitative terms, giving the subject a highly rigorous mathematical treatment. But others were quite at home making much bigger generalisations about the natural world. The American F. E. Clements, who introduced the notion of a succession of colonising plants into an area until it reached climax growth, talked of plant associations in terms of superorganism: 'the plant formation ... a complex organism, which possesses functions and structures, and passes through a cycle of development similar to that of a plant.'6 It was not long before the key concepts of ecology, such as niche, food web, community, ecosystem, diversity and stability, became established, although they remained somewhat vague. Scientists, both in social and in physical sciences, increasingly took note of ecology's holistic way of thinking. Social as well as natural communities were seen to be interrelated and interdependent organisms.
As a social and cultural movement, however, ecology began to develop only after the Second World War, and did not really catch on until the 1960s. It initially combined the anti- mechanistic and holistic approach to biology pioneered by Haeckel with the new approach to economics called 'energy economies' which focused on the problem of scarce and nonrenewable resources. It quickly burst out of these confines and began to appreciate the rich philosophical and literary soil from which its organic ideas and values had grown. Today it draws on a wide variety of philosophical and religious traditions. In the popular mind, it has virtually become synonymous with conservation or the environment; it is even considered by some as a left-wing political conspiracy against economic growth.

Deep ecology
The Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess coined the term 'deep ecology' in 1973. He wanted to distinguish between environmentalism, which is chiefly preoccupied with clearing up the planet, and philosophical ecology (what he calls 'ecosophy'), which seeks to change our understanding of ourselves and our place in nature. 'Ecosophy' derives from the Greek sophia, 'wisdom', and eco,'earth'; it concerns itself with 'earth wisdom'. It studies our place in the Earth House Hold. Although partly inspired by the science of ecology and systems theory, it draws on much wider philosophical and religious traditions, including 'native' American philosophy, Zen Buddhism, Taoism and some pre-Socratic Greek thinkers, as well as Spinoza, Thoreau and Leopold closer to home.
Those deep ecologists, like the Americans Bill Devall and George Sessions, who follow in Naess's philosophical steps call for a new ecological consciousness. They reject the dominant world-view and social paradigm based on mechanical thinking, instrumental rationality and economic growth, which render humans isolated from each other and from nature. They call themselves ecologists because they embrace the central insight of ecology that there is an intermingling of all parts of the universe. They are deep because they look to the fundamental principles which are at the root of our environmental crisis. The archstone of their philosophy is that all life forms have the equal right to live and fulfil their potential.
Naess, strongly influenced by Spinoza and Gandhi, insists that his kind of ecology is deep because it seeks answers to the deeper questions of 'why?' and 'how?' The difference between the shallow and the deep ecology movements is one of depth of argumentation and questioning. The latter looks at fundamental presuppositions of valuation as well as fact and hypotheses.1 For Devall, deep ecology is 'settling into the stream of things as they are. It means moving down into cooler, more profound water.'2
Naess has called his philosophy 'Ecophilosophy T, implying by the use of the letter 'T' that it is only one possible formulation. He is not dogmatic and does not offer his philosophy as a system; it is axiomatic, based primarily on intuition. Fritjof Capra, too, has argued that deep ecology is in keeping with the findings of modern science, but that 'it is rooted in a perception of reality that goes beyond the scientific framework to an intuitive awareness of the oneness of all life, the interdependence of its multiple manifestations and its cycles of change and transformation'.3
The subtitle of Deep Ecology (1989) by Devall and Sessions is 'Living as if Nature Mattered'. In their widely influential book, they state: 'Deep ecology goes beyond the so-called factual scientific level to the level of self and Earth wisdom.' It tries to provide a philosophical foundation for environmental activism. It is not only concerned with cultivating an ecological consciousness but also elaborating sound environmental ethics.
The two ultimate intuitions or norms of deep ecology are 'self- realization' and 'biocentric equality'. By self-realization, deep ecolo-gists mean a form of spiritual unfolding which goes beyond the human to embrace the nonhuman world. It involves like Eastern religions the 'realization of the "self- in- the Self" where the "Self" stands for organic wholeness'. It assumes that 'no one is saved until we are all saved', from entire rainforest systems to the tiniest microbes in the soil.
Naess argued that 'the higher the Self-realization' attained by anyone, 'the broader and deeper the identification with others'.The term 'self- realization' refers to the realization of the personal self, which can involve the negative aspects of self-assertion and aggrandizement, while 'Self-realization' with a capital S refers to the realization of as expansive a sense of self as possible. The former should lead to the latter. The ecosophical outlook is therefore developed through 'an identification so deep that one's own self is no longer adequately delimited by the personal ego or the organism.
One experiences oneself to be a genuine part of all life.' Cosmological identification follows from the realization that 'life is fundamentally one'. It means going from an alienated, atomised, homeless existence to become part of the ecological and cosmic whole, to be at one with all things: 'Now is the time to share with all life forms . . . and Gaia, the fabulous old planet of ours.'
The second intuition of deep ecology - 'biocentric equality' - is a moral principle. Rejecting humanist ethics, which gives a special place to man in nature, deep ecologists argue that since all organisms and entities in the ecosphere are parts of an interrelated whole, they should be considered equal in intrinsic worth. Every form of life should have 'the equal right to live and blossom'. Naess rejects the hierarchical notions of the Great Chain of Being and the scientific ecologists' notion of food chains with predators at the top of the pyramid in favour of a more egalitarian vision in which 'organisms are knots in the biospherical net'.10
Aldo Leopold puts it this way, human beings should consider themselves nothing more than 'plain citizens' in the biotic community; they have no more rights than amoebae. The practical implication of the principle of 'biocentric equality' is that we should live with minimum impact on other species and on earth. We should follow the Hindu path of ahimsa (nonviolence) and do as little harm as possible.
In order to give a popular expression of their philosophy, Naess and Sessions have drawn up a list of basic principles of deep ecology. The first three are the most philosophically important:
1. The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: inherent worth intrinsic value, inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.
2. Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realization of these values and are also values in themselves.
3. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vitalneeds.
In general, deep ecologists would like to allow all entities the freedom to unfold and evolve in their own way unhindered by human domination. Let the river live! Let the whales dive and blow!
From this perspective, deep ecologists like David Ehrenfeld have attacked The Arrogance of Humanism (1978). In their 'religion of humanity', he claims, humanists believe they have the ability to rearrange the world of nature for their own ends. The result has been the destruction of the natural world and its creatures.
It would seem that the very existence of human civil ization is an inevitable violation of biocentric equality. For humans to enjoy the 'equal right to live and blossom', to achieve self- realization, they must destroy plant and animal life. However, this does not mean they should not keep their impact to a minimum and interfere as little as possible in natural ecosystems. Nor does it mean trying to 'civilize' the wild by eradicating predators, thereby upsetting the natural balance. The value of wilderness areas is independent of human purposes, whether they be full of life, as in the Amazon rainforest, or comparatively inert, as in Antarctica. They have intrinsic or existential value. If humans, the most potent species on earth, set aside areas for other creatures to enjoy, it is merely a disinterested gesture of good will.
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