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The celebration of the 30th anniversary of The Trumpeter is a good time to take another look at the deep ecology movement and its development. A so-called "new conservation" movement has recently emerged that claims the traditional conservation/environmental movement (and deep ecology) had it all wrong. I will offer an informal summary of the deep ecology movement, while referencing more detailed analyses of the issues. Finally I will refer to a powerful new critique of the "new conservation" movement, inspired by the leading conservation biologist Michael Soulé: Keeping the Wild: Against the Domestication of Earth.1
I.
In his original 1972/73 deep ecology paper, Arne Naess claims the deep ecology movement arose from scientists - ecologists who were out in the field studying the biodiversity and wild ecosystems throughout the world. They were also doing the work of philosophers, laying the foundations for the Age of Ecology and a new ecological worldview to replace the anthropocentric, mastery of Nature, and modernist worldview arising in the 17th and 18th centuries. Three of the most influential ecological spokespersons of the 1960's were Rachel Carson, David Brower, and Paul Ehrlich.
Rachel Carson is usually given credit for giving birth to the modern environmental movement, but I am also arguing that she was also the mother of the deep ecology movement. For example, Arne Naess pointed out that "Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (from which we can date the beginnings of the international deep ecology movement) insisted that everything, not just politics, would have to be changed."2 John Burnside claimed that she became the "unlikely founder of the radical [deep] ecology movement." Indeed, Carson demanded "a new way of thinking about the world" and our relationship with the natural world, which encapsulates the fundamental intuition of deep ecology.3
The leaders of the deep ecology movement were not only ecologists, but some were also mountain climbers who spent a lot of time in wild Nature. David Brower was a Sierra backpacker and mountain climber who, when he became the first executive director of the Sierra Club in 1952, was handed a copy of Aldo Leopold's A Sand County Almanac to read. Leopold was, of course, one of the first major ecologists of the 1920's and 1930's, and a leading proponent of protecting...