Confronting Economic and Social Realities, 1980–1999 161
and the Environment and the Subcommittee on
Oceanography of the Committee on Merchant Marine
and Fisheries, House of Representatives, 97th Cong.,
1st sess., on H.R. 3252, April 27, 1981, June 23, 1981,
June 22, 1982 (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing
Office, n.d.), Serial no. 97-37, pp. 9-10; Statements:
pp. 24-26, 346.the Coastal Barrier Resources Act.... This legis-
lationwill deny reasonable use of private property
and is a de facto Federal land-use bill masquerading
as a fiscally conservative measure. The chief aim of
this bill is to halt coastal development and Congress
should address this legislation on that basis.
Source: Barrier Islands: Hearings Before the
Subcommittee on Fisheries and Wildlife Conservation
DOCUMENT 129: Arne Naess on Deep Ecology (1982, 1984)
The deep ecologist Arne Naess, a Norwegian philosopher who has taught in the United States, developed a
radical, very personal approach to environmental issues. In his 1973 essay “The Shallow and the Deep, Long-
Range Ecology Movements,” Naess dismisses the “fight against pollution and resource depletion” as a “Shallow
Ecology movement” with only “the health and affluence of people in the developed countries” as its “central
objective.”^7 He proposes that people who are seriously concerned about the environment should reconsider
some of their basic assumptions and values. Naess’s ideas were little known in the United States until the 1980s,
when they were promoted and developed by the philosopher George Sessions and the sociologist Bill Devall. His
basic principles of deep ecology—the deep ecology platform—were refined on a camping trip to Death Valley,
California, with Sessions in April 1984.A. Arne Naess Explains
Deep Ecology, 1982
The essence of deep ecology is to ask deeper
questions. The adjective “deep” stresses that
we ask why and how, where others do not. For
instance, ecology as a science does not ask what
kind of a society would be the best for maintain-
ing a particular ecosystem—that is considered a
question for value theory, for politics, for ethics.
As long as ecologists keep narrowly to their sci-
ence, they do not ask such questions. What we
need today is a tremendous expansion of eco-
logical thinking in what I call ecosophy. Sophy
comes from the Greek term sophia, “wisdom,”
which relates to ethics, norms, rules, and prac-
tice. Ecosophy, or deep ecology, then, involves a
shift from science to wisdom.
For example, we need to ask questions like,
Why do we think that economic growth and high
levels of consumption are so important? The
conventional answer would be to point to the
economic consequences of not having economic
growth. But in deep ecology, we ask whether the
present society fulfills basic human needs like love
and security and access to nature, and, in so doing,
we question our society’s underlying assumptions.
We ask which society, which education, which form
of religion, is beneficial for all life on the planet as a
whole, and then we ask further what we need to do
in order to make the necessary changes. We are not
limited to a scientific approach; we have an obliga-
tion to verbalize a total view.B. The Deep Ecology Platform, 1984- The flourishing of human and non-human
living beings has value in itself. The value
of non-human beings is independent of
their usefulness to humans. - Richness of kinds of living beings has
value in itself. - Humans have no right to reduce this rich-
ness except to satisfy vital human needs. - The flourishing of human life is compat-
ible with a substantial decrease of the
human population. The flourishing of
non- human life requires such a decrease. - Present human interference with the non-
human world is excessive, and the situa-
tion is worsening.