In my work running eco-education courses, I often witness intense discussions about ecology. As you can imagine, many of the people who would sign-up for an eco-education course are highly motivated and often passionate about environmental issues.
The content of such discussions usually fall into two broad categories. Realising the delineation between these two categories marks the greatest challenge to the modern environmental movement and can be clearly seen in the difference between the terms “shallow” and “deep” ecology. This difference is in the depth and breadth of the analysis that is applied to an issue.
“Environmentalists”, in our trash-media culture, dwell as a dangerous threat to the civilised world, lurking in the mythical twilight along with suicide bombers, plumb-pudding bomb toting anarchists in big black capes, tie-die clad anti-road campaigners and those folks that shimmy up cooling towers and unleash big banners about carbon emissions. Environmentalists are those pesky creatures that get under the skin of property developers, economists and good honest business – they stand in the way of “progress”. But, in fact, they are mostly shallow in their approach.
The ‘environment’ itself refers to that collection of physical elements that go to make up the fabric of the Earth, and quite often human beings are factored out – so that the environment is a stage set and human beings are the audience. Most people who have studied ecology as a science – Scientific Ecology – will have studied it using the stage-set model, where information is gathered about something that can then be used to ‘manage’ it.
Environmentalists are concerned about this physical fabric, about what’s happening on the stage. “Deep Ecologists” on the other hand, are more concerned about the relationships between things, about the story that is unfolding on stage, about what’s going on back-stage. They are the ones in the audience shouting, “it’s behind yer!” because they know that we are all on the stage together and that what we each do has a direct impact on the play. Furthermore, they know that in reality the system – the plot – is way more complex than the human mind will ever be able to fathom – control and management are myths. Only precaution and respect are practical and only getting up on stage and joining in will be effective.
The first rule of ecology is that everything is connected to everything else. This means that energy production is linked to poverty, that consumerism is linked to war, that pollution is linked to immigration issues and that the failings of the National Health Service are linked to the 24 hour opening policies of supermarkets. It takes deep ecological thought to make these connections, most “environmentalists” stay in the safety of the shallow end.
I heard a story of an open day at a University Ecology department where one new student was horrified to see professors and research fellows, students and administrators, eating big lumps of barbecued, industrially farmed steak (produced by clear-cutting rain forest for grazing), off paper plates (with a non-degradable plastic finish), and sucking down Coke (the very symbol of the trade liberalisation that is devastating the livelihoods of the majority of the world’s people), from polystyrene cups (which take 500 years to biodegrade), while discussing the despicable state of funding for conservation projects! This is shallow ecology – they are concerned about ‘the environment’ but they have failed to factor their own behaviour into the picture.
I witness many organisations these days that are passionately advocating pro-environmental activism: charities; non-government organisations (NGO’s); academic departments and local government, for example. I get quite a lot of exposure to these groups and many of the people that attend my courses come from just such organisations. But while one hand is busy worrying about saving specific species, preserving patches of landscape, clean energy, recycling, carbon emissions, waste management, industrial agriculture and health problems caused by environmental conditions, many seem to be missing the fact that they all drive to work, go on short-haul foreign holidays by air, consume numerous sweat-shop products and buy their food, clothes and consumables from transnational corporations that are holding the majority of the world’s population to ransom through global free trade. In effect, they cancel out the good they do at work through their own personal behaviour because their thinking is shallow – it does not cut down deep, and often painfully, into the flesh.
Those that neither work nor live as part of an ecologically sustainable solution are proportionately more responsible for the problem. Inaction is the same as acting in the opposite direction – a difficult and controversial thing to say perhaps, but true non-the-less. But, before you consume yourself with guilt or perhaps feel resentful of me for pointing these home truths out… we are trapped in a double-bind. The average household in the UK lives in such a way that we would require about three planet Earths to maintain it in the long-term. Even those that live like eco-angels cannot actually reduce their impact to a truly sustainable level. Our society is not structured to allow us to live sustainably, it is an impossibility in contemporary Britain, beyond isolated and small-scale community projects.
The only way forward is to change the fundamental structures and beliefs of our culture and that means challenging everything from economics to religion, and from psychology to education. To make these challenges clear and unequivocal requires deep ecological thinking and this is the defining difference between what most people think of as ‘environmentalism’ which is essentially shallow ecology in it’s dominant form, and ‘deep ecology’.