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What is said and done1
Two years before her death in 2009, environmentalist, feminist, and town planner, Sue Hendler, presented me with me a pile of Trumpeter journals she had kept, preserved in her university office. They ran from the very first issue, just a single double-sided piece of photostatted paper, through to the end of volume four in the fall of 1987, published just as I began my own PhD in environmental philosophy. Alan Drengson's (1983, 1) opening suggestion that the time was ripe to initiate a Canadian "econetwork" seems borne out by the fact that this newsletter has since become the premier journal for deep ecology/ecosophy. Fittingly, it opened with a very brief discussion of a few "basic concepts" that might serve to differentiate deep ecology from shallow anthropocentric environmentalism and from scientific ecology:
Ecology in the narrow sense refers to the biological science of ecology. However, ecological paradigms and principles are being developed and applied in almost all disciplines, and these paradigms have to do with the way we approach understanding the relationships and inter-connections within and between living beings which give to each its special place and identity. Human ecology, e.g., must certainly take account of the role of our subjective lives and spiritual needs, as well as our biological ones, in terms of their ecological effects. Ecology in this sense is not a reductionist undertaking, but a movement toward a more whole (or holistic) vision and understanding of world processes. Deep ecology seeks to look into all levels of existence (ibid., 2, emphasis in original)
The subsequent influence of deep ecology can be gauged by its frequent association with environmental activism but also by the extent to which it became a target of ill-considered and often ill-tempered critiques from all shades of the traditional political spectrum.
Deep ecology, it has been said, is mystical, misanthropic, politically misguided, utopian, irrational, and impractical. Its subjectivism and holism constitute "mindless dogmas" born from the "intellectual poverty" of its "father", Arne Naess (Bookchin 1993, 47). Despite pointing to its naive naturalism many, somewhat ironically, also consider deep ecology insufficiently materialistic, even a contemporary form of "idealism" (the ultimate Marxist putdown). Its explicit intellectual diversity is reinterpreted as the lack of a coherent theoretical paradigm...