Deep ecology is the ancient idea that man is a percentage of the world, not the proprietor and master of the world. The globe applied to populated completely by cultures who possessed this vision. They weren’t perfective and they weren’t particularly noble but their means of life worked. They didn’t overrun and threaten to destruct the world.
10,000 years ago a new culture emerged. This was a culture that believed man owned the entire world and it was his right to exploit it for his own benefit. Armed with this vision these humans were not content to concede their food supply to be at nature’s whim. So they started out an intense form of agriculture, one whose vision was the single minded production of humane food at the expense of other life forms.
With all the extra food came extra humans. With all the extra humans came geographical elaboration. The remainder had been thrown out, this culture began to expand exponentially. It took only 10,000 years for them to spread out all over the entire globe, wiping out or absorbing all of the first cultures that stood in their way. The world stands bleeding at their feet.
Now 99. 8% of the world’s population believe in the modern idea that the world exists purely as a resource for man’s benefit. Those people, who still think of an old idea that man belongs to the community of life are very few and their numbers are shrinking.
Deep ecology is the re-introduction of all these old idea into new and current environmental thinking. Mainstream environmentalism seeks to save the world but exclusively for humane benefit. Only so we may carry on to own and exploit the world for future generations.
Deep ecology is attempting to shift this thinking. The world has value for its own sake. Man is a percentage of it but it surely wasn’t invented exclusively for us. There are millions of other species that percentage this ecosystem with us and they likewise have a right to life. The more humankind elaborates and the more resources he puts below his control, the less there is for everyone else. At present it is approximated that 200 species a day are becoming extinct. Whether or not we carry on to destruct biodiversity in this fashion then our means of life is most surely going to crumble.
All of mankind’s flourishing for more then last 10,000 years has come at the expense of the rest of creation. Soon there are going to be nothing left for us to take vantage of.
Deep ecology advocates a back step to the old idea that man belongs to the world. Shallow actions like recycling and hybrid cars aren’t going to save us. We must ask intense questions and get the very root of our assumptions when it comes to who we are and what we are doing on this planet.
It is a radical call, but these are definetly radical times and more radical actions must occur.