First published in The Great Outdoors Magazine, May 2003. Since this date the conference mentioned was successfully convened and a report about it can be read here. Arne Naess, whose 90th Birthday was honoured through this conference, died on 12th January 2009 at 96 years of age.
The previous eight weeks of my life had consisted of a daily climb to an altitude above 2500 metres. There, in the crisp white and blue world of the sacred summit and plateaus of New Zealand’s Mt Ruapehu (ru-a-pey-who), I circulated through my working day. Each week I would spend one, and often two nights sleeping out under the wide Southern sky. Sometimes encased deep in a snow hole, other times perched on an icy ledge in my small tent. My clients would be four adults wanting to learn the basic skills of travelling in an Alpine environment, having signed up for a five-day mountaineering skills course.
This had been my 9-5, my commute, my working week.
Next I am on an aeroplane somewhere over the sparkling Pacific Ocean. White noise. Finally, after a week of travelling, I am walking down the driveway of Schumacher College in Devon, on my way to meet the Norwegian philosopher, Arne Næss.
He was 85 when I met him, and still partial to a bit of bouldering when a convenient crag was at hand. In his early days he was Norway’s finest mountaineer, famed for his bold routes and Himalayan first ascents, including expeditions in the 1920’s that would be seen as challenging by contemporary standards. He is also Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Oslo, having resigned his full-time position as the University’s youngest appointed Professor many years ago, in order to get out more. A prolific author and a household name in Norway, he became famous in the world of environmental philosophy when he used the term “Deep Ecology” to describe the difference between essentially ‘shallow’ approaches to environmental thinking and those that challenged us to go much deeper – to ask questions about psychology, culture, lifestyles and the way we perceive the world around us. Shallow approaches, Næss claimed, didn’t solve environmental problems because they didn’t seek to change the social, political and cultural structures that had caused those problems in the first place. It’s what motivates us to live in an environmentally responsible way that matters. If we live ecologically because we have been told to, or forced to pay extra tax or fined for failing to, then we will never change our lifestyles fast enough to meet the challenges of ecological sustainability. We must actually come to realise that living sustainably is a prerequisite to reaching our own potentials as human beings. To live at the cost of the systems we depend on for our vital needs, is a zero-sum game – there will be no winners.
In a room surrounded by 19 others, amongst them Doctors and Professors, Activists and Actors, this little old man sat and answered questions about his Deep Ecology. The academics asked academic questions about metaphysics, the activists about lifestyles and education, the actor about feelings and intuition. Næss fielded these questions patiently, usually with humorous anecdotes, always leaving us aghast at the quality of his answers. Eventually it was my turn, a mountaineer and outdoor educator fresh off the icy slopes of New Zealand’s Central Plateau. “What” I asked “was the best mountaineering trip you ever did”. His face lit up, he turned his chair towards me and began a story about traversing the Pyrenees along the Haute Route from the Atlantic to the Mediterranean Sea. “Why” he asked me during the tea break that followed, “didn’t you ask that question sooner?”
Arne Næss arrived at “Deep Ecology” because he spent much of his life living high in the Norwegian mountains. As a young man he suddenly realised one day, that he was no longer a “climber” but a “mountaineer”. “Climber”, he says, refers to the person, is centred around the human individual. Mountaineer includes the word “mountain”, honours the mountain and puts the mountain first relating the place to the person as a secondary matter. With this realisation Næss stopped climbing before he reached summits, realising the higher achievement of accepting the “greatness” of a mountain, of being humble in the face of ‘free-nature”, of realising his own humanity.
The people who took Næss’s ideas up first, were, almost without exception, mountaineers. They understood the vitality of going deeper, asking deeper questions, living closer to the heart of our natural world, living on the edge of living itself. Next, intellectuals engaged with his ideas but often misunderstood them, over analysed them, added their own agendas or sought to coerce them into older philosophies, religions even. The New Age movement embraced deep ecology’s earthy ideas and its’ commonalities with Eastern philosophies, developing their own brands of deep ecology that in fact have little to do with Næss’s original ideas.
But Næss accepted all these interpretations, emphasising the importance of human cultural diversity for the survival of our species. He also promoted the Ghandian idea that even violently conflicting beliefs can be resolved through a commitment to finding common ground, somewhere, somehow. This commonality – this community – is the method to living ecologically.
But the heart of the matter is in the mountains. It is here where Næss punched through into the deep ecological world and it his here still that the heart of Deep Ecology is to be found.
From experiences of wild places can emerge great insights – wilderness holds a philosophy of it’s own, taps into a psychology that is somehow far deeper, one that transcends our social and cultural “norms”. And yet, in the UK, there has never been a public forum for exploring these insights.
On the 3rd and 4th of May 2003, there is to be an event held at Glenmore Lodge in the Highlands of Scotland called “Wild at Heart: The Philosophy and Psychology of Wild Places” . The event will bring together academics, conservationists, outdoor educators, performance artists, writers and activists to explore the role our wild places play in forming the philosophies and world-views by which we live. To my knowledge, it is the first time people from backgrounds this diverse have formally come together in the UK to explore our relationship with wilderness in a forum that is open to all, and it promises to be an exceptional event.
It is perhaps fitting that this conference takes place in Arne Næss’s 90th birthday year and as a direct result of his comment to me during that tea break at Schumacher College five years ago. It’s time to make the leap from the clutter of academia, from the flawed philosophies of our modern social order, and most essentially – away from shallow environmentalism. It is time to realise that people change due to the daily, personal experiences that they live through and that these experiences are given an unrivalled edge of ecological realism when we venture into the Earths’ wild lands.