Deepest Ecology: A Philosophy for Saving the Earth

By Andrew Porter

Deepest Ecology: A Philosophy for Saving the Earth explores the philosophical and psychological aspects of a new, sustainable paradigm, for individuals and societies. The book outlines the problems and tracks various successes -- individuals, technologies, thinkers, places -- that point the way and inspire.
The work articulates a philosophy critical to our times and develops a paradigm for a better relationship with the Earth. It delves into climate change, culture, and the frame of a sound mindset. In this time of intersecting environmental crises, we need a clear perspective on where we are and where we’re going. This book seeks to raise questions and offer direction about a sound and sustainable future.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9780359735761

Book preview

Deepest Ecology: A Philosophy for Saving the Earth

Deepest Ecology: A Philosophy for Saving the Earth

Andrew Porter

"The earth—ah, who knows her losses?

Only one who with nonetheless praising sound

would sing the heart, born into the whole."

 Rilke

Copyright©2019 Andrew Porter. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reprinted, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Unconscious Society

What a world we live in. Here in the early twenty-first century, we live on parallel, incompatible tracks: we bemoan the damage the Earth sustains at our hands and we continue to degrade and foul large swaths of the planet as if we are wholly oblivious. We know that time is short, yet we treat it as long. As we face an overlapping set of environmental crises – climate change, pollution, species loss, and other environmental catastrophes – what can thoughtful people do to start to see the seriousness of the issues with clarity? How has perspective been warped and distorted?

In a time of increasing environmental threats to Earth's ecosystems, some would think the last thing we need is philosophy; we need action. But useful action stems from a mindset, and a mindset needs to be educated. In addition, it needs to be fundamentally sound and culturally supported. As we learn more and more every day, an integrity within us is needed to ensure ecological integrity across ecosystems. Philosophy's role in this current set of ecological crises is to undergird any action or complexes of action in ground that is fertile.

People often jump to practicalities, wondering how a 'philosophy' or 'theory' is to be implemented. Polemic, they spout, is not a working plan. But one customarily unrecognized fact is that a vision, once fully appreciated, necessarily leads to practical steps, i.e. life in its various arenas. It is not too much to say that an ecological mindset and good ideas are the saving of the planet.

What would it really take to reconfigure our thinking past a stultified mindset, or mindsets for which you can think up your own negative adjectives? How many people would adjudge, for instance, that we – if there is such a thing as ‘we’ – live in a set of societies that do not demand enough from us, or demand things it shouldn’t? Society does not demand that we live within ecological limits. This is largely because they are only seen as limits rather than what they also are, opportunities. The world at large tends to rake us over with pollution, which, in all its forms, is a series of failures of will, vision, and self-management. It denudes our options for a full life, and fails chance, aspiration, and the currents of betterment. Not to mention the option of surviving for many other species.

This book is about the ideas that underpin a workable new paradigm. It explores the parameters and philosophical cast of such a paradigm.

We live in an age that trips over itself, steps on its own toes, and does not know where it stands. It runs, rather, and runs out. We need to stand on firmer ground, and more firmly. We as societies very much need to establish ecological fundaments to all our ways of being, to rejoin the great enterprise, the Earth’s experience. It would seem absurd on the face of it to undo all this civilization, but in large measure this is exactly what we must do, and consciously, to avoid and undo the absurd.

Robert Traer, in his 2009 book Doing Environmental Ethics, writes:

Our environmental crisis is a conflict between the world of human culture and the world of nature. Our way of life is the problem, and thus also the solution. This crisis is due largely to our ethical failure, in the world of human culture, to grant moral consideration to the intrinsic worth of the world of nature. How are we to resolve this problem? (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2009.)

That is indeed the question. This book explores the parameters of the problem and a possible set of solutions. A new paradigm must govern human culture. How we get there is worth considerable consideration.

The ecological life, for an individual and for a community or society, demands much from us. But then reality will do that. The great things that it bestows are equal to what it demands. When livin’ is hard, it gains from being pure and profound. When livin’ is easy, the work is within you to incorporate and participate in the values that Earth’s ecological way of being embodies.

We increasingly learn that Earth has an ecological way of being. If we are unconscious of that, or willfully ignore that truth, then we cook our own goose. But, contrarily, if we meet our own nature and broader nature where they are as they are, without undo manipulation and with respect and eagerness, we join the great enterprise, and live as creatures integrated with many others, finally using our rationality.  

The new paradigm is about treating the Earth as a living cell, and ourselves as a nub of the reticulum. We need to leave our inorganic (polluting, exploitive, manipulative, mechanistic) ways behind and integrate with the nature of the cell we are part of. Each biome is, as it were, a Golgi body, a mitochondrion, a centrosome, ribosome, lysosome, and cytoplasm. We cannot be invaders but must be of a piece. The new paradigm is what I call wholeness with the Earth.

As things are, we imagine that if a vaquita, Georgia aster, or hawksbill sea turtle could speak, each would express feelings both sad and mad as endangered remnants of their kind. But it is not too late to imagine a world reoriented to ecological harmony. Education focused on human ecology. Government guiding, corralling, and transforming people’s practices, excesses and ways of living. A population in sync with carrying capacity. An integration of humans and nature, along lines we can do our best to determine that nature sanctions. Love in the heart for the vitality and soundness of nature. We can live an ecological life. We need, however, to understand it intellectually to align our ‘cells,’ as it were, with the growth that makes us a worthy and not an aberrant species.

Much of current education, industry, social policy, politics, culture is a strange frittering away of time and meaning. This moiling, mewling life we live is, in large measure, dishonest, inappropriately destructive of our own potential, fulfillment, and flourishing. It is concurrently disastrously destructive of the planet too—species, overall health, nuanced forms of balance, lives that would themselves flourish. How did unconsciousness get to be the acceptable, embraced way of being?

We are on the threshold of living in a Great Consciousness, which is sensitive to the being and relations of all things, and gives equal value to particulars and wholes. The Earth itself is especially evident as a Great Consciousness, a network of ecosystems and planetary systems that concentrate and disperse energy, dedicate and interrelate lives. If we are largely unconscious, what is our habitation?

Aaron James in Surfing With Sartre says, As the world's climate changes before our eyes, as scientists increasingly fear wild and uncharted ecological damage, if we avoid certain deep philosophical questions about the human condition and responsible actions, we will have sealed our fate, having written our head-in-the-sand story. A more meaningful ending would have us facing up, heroically, to the biggest questions. (New York: Doubleday, 2017.)

As an incredible evolution of species has come to inhabit a trillion niches on Earth, we need to evolve beyond our crude ways of thinking and develop systems of thought that integrate us with the functioning of the planet.

My goodness, we tolerate such absurdity. The world seems to continually falter back to a stolid, seemingly reasonable default: to be structured as it is. But to take the example of United States society: its premises are largely all wrong. Why does the current-day world not do the opposite of staying stuck as it is? Why not envision a better way in light of golden opportunities and serious, deep problems?

Currently it is as if we skim along, focusing blearily on the shallow issues, unwilling to develop the wisdom to see real problems at the individual, community, and larger level. But we live in a world in which we need to be radical. To stop the exotic animal trade, etc. this year. To abandon industrialism in ten. Our brains take on metallic micro-particles and can’t think straight.

We likely have one chance to address and solve big problems. It is hard to know why we are not more radical. It is evident that we need to be much more conscious of how we live on the planet—especially imperative given the rising world population.

We’ve learned what destructible means as we’ve degraded the Earth’s balances and purity. And we are learning what preservation and restoration mean. What kind of agent will we be? If we become Earth’s creature, will that not be the ultimate accolade, trophy, and achievement?

We need to create, understand, and live a new paradigm, a sound, Earth-sanctioned one. This will exercise and invest our best talents. Once we are ecological, our place on the globe will be earned, and this harmony is essential if both parties are to thrive.

In our contemporary world, the current mindset is one, generally, that largely cannot imagine ecologically sustainable ways of life; our current ways of life mirror the fact that we a combination of oblivious, overweening, hopeful, resigned, and numb.

As we start to think about a radical revamping, perhaps we can envision bottom-up sense and top-down sense working together. Ecological living, could indeed become the chosen going mode. We probably always jump to implementation too fast, since the synapse-jump is the most important, but can we envision practical steps in conjunction with theoretical ones in order to shift unsustainable practices to radically better, more utterly Earth-friendly ones?

It is hard to deny that sustainable human presence in and among ecosystems requires vision. It demands an articulation and practice of an ecological paradigm. Especially in this time of soaring population growth and dinosaur-like mindsets, a paradigm itself has to be sustainable. Thought undergirds every aspect of life, and if culture and consciousness are to improve toward integration with the Earth’s processes, thought needs to become ecological, with sustained sense as warranted by nature.

There are those who say it just isn’t going to happen. They claim to be realists, citing the intransigence and willful ignorance of so many on every level. Governments are derelict, people are blinkered and worse, and time is very short. The phoenix is indeed a mythical bird. However, what if we took another flying species as our bell weather species?—bees. A world that allows them unimpaired vitality would, for them, be sustainable and virtuous. Cannot this be done? Are we truly lame and crippled, casting pollinators aside for polluters?

Minds are made for creating and envisioning. A sustainable ecological paradigm for us means an ongoing exploration of and commitment to living in tune with the Earth’s opportunities and limits. It means being courageous in stopping what we need to stop, and starting what we need to start. If we thought it desirable to, say, clean up Washington D.C.'s Anacostia River to mountain stream purity, we would simply implement what needed to be done, not in the way of technology but in the way of ceasing to pollute. There is nothing unrealistic in bettering our relationship with the planet since it is the only context that sustains our lives. And a paradigm that will sustain what ought to be sustained on the Earth can only come from the synergy of principle and vision.

What is the alternative argument to my call for us to live according to nature’s terms? Some, like, David Biello in his book The Unnatural World: The Race to Remake Civilization in Earth’s Newest Age (2016), propose that we should take on the role of global managers, but isn’t the real solution to manage ourselves? ‘Environmental innovation,’ meaning applied science and a stewarding management class, is just more of the problem: unwisdom thinking it’s wisdom. It is ‘management’ of our moral selves, the old-fashioned way, that offers a way out of ecological destruction.

Michael McCarthy, in his book The Moth Snowstorm: Nature and Joy, points out:

That the natural world can bring us peace; that the natural world can give us joy: these are the confirmations of what many people may instinctively feel but have not been able to articulate; that nature is not an extra, a luxury, but on the contrary is indispensable, part of our essence. And now that knowledge needs to be brought to nature’s defence.

As we plow forward into the 21st-century, like a ship heading into a gale, the threat which hangs over the natural world is without president: eight points to a culminating moment in the history of humankind, this one life form out of the earths millions which, it may well be possible to write soon enough, rose from all the others to possess language and consciousness, to create art online medicine, even to voyage into space, but which ended up destroying its own home." (New York: New York Review Books, 2015.)

Indeed, mankind’s actions and attitudes, en masse, are out of scale, out of sync with nature’s ways of being. This must change.

What’s On Its Way Out

Fossil fuels are on their way out. But much more importantly, the extractive attitude is, by necessity or by choice, also on the way out. Were we to choose our path, living with discipline and ecological integrity, we would usher in a paean to choice. The paean would come to us from nature. We would limit our energy use to what is within human bounds as a human creature in association with all others, not as an agent of death and ill-health. We enter the Age of Limits. To choose it is noble; but then principled action has always been a huge struggle for mankind. What is it that we must work toward becoming?

Exploitive attitudes and practices are on their way out. Deeply ingrained in the fabric and habits of industrialized societies, they and the business flurry that daily extends them are not going down without a fight. So let’s have an honest cultural fight; let’s put in place—that is, displace—what has no place in the new paradigm.

Industrial models, growth economies, and mechanistic bunkum are all very much on their way out. The United States, in effect, wiped out the Native Americans; now that Native American connection to the earth and respect for proper place within the Great Spirit will, as a concept and new way of life, decimate the industrial world. Of course this will not be done by the choice of most; surely we would not let it come about by sheer acts of nature; of course it won’t come about over a very long time. The new paradigm can only come about by placing power in the hands of the ecologically minded, which this culture can, theoretically, do. That theory undergirds the near future.

Some say you cannot change entrenched ways and ingrained desires. The genie is out of the bottle. The world is proceeding forward, and largely on the track it has been on and continues to follow. But this is ludicrous, if understandable. We are only slowly coming to terms with how radical we must become.

The future is the age of the limits. But the word ‘limits’ strikes different people different ways. The optimal way to look at it, if we craft it aright, is to deem and treat ‘the age of limits’ as ‘the age of opportunity.’ Not for money or exploitive gain or power, but for that which really feeds life and is much more properly gain. The contemporary world tends to argue that limitation – to make the world truly green, and radically last technological-industrial-consumerist – would be, on the face of it, a severe slashing into and curtailing of freedom. I strongly disagree. What are power and freedom but that funneled through and in sync with what is most holistically natural?

Choice Not Necessity

Cultures and societies – mankind in general – has a big uphill climb in moving into ecological ways. But stronger muscles and good gears make an uphill climb more doable. It may sound strange, but philosophy, culturally infused, is the surest, soundest way for us to create and live the new paradigm.

If we are superentangled with the web of systems and lives of the whole Earth, isn’t our practice and self-assessment all about whether we make it sick or not? We are a global agent, with choice. If bad, destructive choices are habitually made, what a virulent, nastily rogue species we are. If, on the other hand, we can generally make fine, ecologically sound choices, limiting ourselves to what only causes health planet-wide, we save ourselves and the Earth at once.

Necessity is an adamantine fact when it arrives. We are currently paving the way for our extinction and expulsion. It would be profoundly sad if all man can do is run off the cliff. Taking the most sensitive and innocent with him. The new paradigm we can create envisions another way, a holistic integration with the tenor and character of ecological systems on the good, green-white-tan-and-blue Earth.

We are especially bad at accepting limits. We think it is against our brainpower. But in fact it is the only brainpower. We should not only accept limits but embrace them, as living within the freedoms and constraints of nature, fully and without manipulation, is our freedom and possibility for good actualized.

New political structures and assumptions will need to be created, framed around ecological soundness. When the planet thrives, we thrive; it’s as simple as that. New modes of society and individual rights and actions will be cast and adapted. This should, of course, be chosen. To wait for glowering necessity to storm over us would be a failure of nerve, intelligence, and vision.

Wilderness loss planet-wide exactly parallels the morals-loss planet-wide. Among those who exercise influence, moral concern for the whole, the biosphere and its biomes, and common good has waned significantly from a none-too-high place fifty years ago. In proportion, wilderness has been shredded, shorn, and decimated.

A September 2016 Huffington Post article had the headline: In Twenty Short Years, We’ve Wiped Out 10% of the Earth’s Wilderness. This article reported that only 23% of wilderness now remains, that an area twice the size of Alaska [has been] lost in two decades. It calls this devastating and catastrophic. Some biomes, it reported, have almost no wilderness left. (https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/catastrophic-wilderness-loss-maps_us_57cde175e4b0e60d31dfccbf)

A restoration of proper balance and proportions, priorities and proprieties, requires a philosophical sea-change, the most important component of which is that philosophy will matter to individual, communal, and cultural life. This does not mean ‘philosophy’ in the academic sense, but rather an invigoration of concern for furtherance of sustainability, the good and right, rights and justice, ecological health and soundness.

Thus, we must work from the ground up, as it were, if we as a species—with diverse cultures and governments—are to maintain a habitable, hale world. All the actions and habits, layers and assumptions, practices and mindsets, rest on an underpinning. Currently, the absence of a lot of essential things is the underpinning, and I would surely avoid crossing that bridge or leaning all my weight there.

We now need to imagine a steady reinstatement of wilderness at double the rate – going forward from this point – that we have lost it over the past twenty or fifty years. The pieces that need to be put in place flow from the philosophical strength and legitimacy that undergird the pieces. Can we see now what is a top priority?

If this strongly seems like it isn’t going to happen, do we have the courage to address and account for why?