Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Deeper Organic Agriculture: Arne Naess
by David Orton
05 August 2009
http://www.culturechange.org/cms/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=502&Itemid=65

The Norwegian eco-philosopher Arne Naess was the leader of the deep ecology 
movement. He died recently, at the age of 96. His influence was enormous on 
the environmental and green movements and in other sections of society which 
see the necessity of humans coming into a different relationship with the 
natural world. As Naess said, "The earth does not belong to humans." The 
ideas of Naess are seen by many as having expressed in broad strokes what 
should be our relationship to the natural world in the 21st Century. He saw 
and wrote about the necessity to move away from human-centeredness and 
towards an Earth-centeredness which is respectful of all species and not just 
humans. Naess said if we are to hope to avert ecological and social disaster, 
individuals need to define their "selves" as being part of the natural world.

One can perhaps illustrate the influence of Arne Naess by looking at two 
better known Canadian thinkers who were intellectually indebted to him. They 
are Stan Rowe (1918-2004) and John Livingston (1923-2006). Rowe was employed 
as a professor of plant ecology at the University of Saskatchewan from 1968 
until 1985, and earlier in his career by the Canadian Forestry Service. As a 
Forest Service employee Rowe wrote the much cited book The Forest Regions of 
Canada. There are also two books of essays by him, Home Place: Essays on 
Ecology (1990), and Earth Alive: Essays On Ecology, published posthumously.

Rowe upheld the deep ecology viewpoint that "We are Earthlings first, humans 
second." For him, we humans need a new view of the Earth, a new value system 
which is being born in the current ecological crisis. This value system 
challenges in a fundamental way our past, culturally acquired, human-centered 
view of Nature as just "resources" for humankind to exploit. For Rowe the 
Earth-centered biologist, it was quite false to make absolute distinctions 
between the organic and the inorganic or between the animate and inanimate. 
"What would qualify as animate, living, organic and biotic without sunlight, 
water, soil, air?"

Like Naess, Rowe also opposed the taken for granted 'truths' of the dominant 
ideas in our society, that we need population growth along with economic 
growth, city growth, consumption growth, etc. As many others have shown (for 
example Richard Heinberg in The Party's Over), it was an expanding 
agricultural production fed by fossil fuels which enabled the astonishing 
growth of the world's population. But this cheap energy is coming to an end. 
Naess, Rowe and Heinberg all saw the necessity to vastly scale back human 
populations, if we are to have any long term sustainable relationship with 
the Earth.

John Livingston, a mentor for David Suzuki, was a naturalist, broadcaster, 
and university teacher and influenced by the ideas of Arne Naess. He wrote a 
number of books with perhaps the two most influential being The Fallacy of 
Wildlife Conservation and Rogue Primate. Livingston took the basic deep 
ecology idea that nonhuman life has value in itself and is not dependent upon 
humans for justification, countering this to the widely accepted belief that 
Nature and wildlife are commodities or resources solely for human 
exploitation. For Livingston and for deep ecology supporters, wild nature is 
not here to serve humans but must be defended and valued for its own sake.

For deep ecology supporters, food production goes hand in hand with the 
defense of wild nature. (Many deep ecology supporters are vegetarians.) 
Regardless, they advocate wildlife-friendly farming, not raising "sheep" 
while coyotes are being trapped or poisoned. For Naess, "animal factories 
interfere with the dignity of pigs." He supported agriculture, not 
agribusiness, and believed that "in future green societies food calculated as 
a percentage of income will cost us substantially more than it does today."

Deep ecologists also support local food rather than food which is shipped 
thousand of miles and produced by fossil-fuel based industrial agriculture.

I believe there is quite a "fit" between the ideas of Naess and that part of 
the organic farming and gardening movement which sees the production of 
wholesome, regionally-based, non-chemically nourished food, as going hand in 
hand with the protection of wildlife and wild nature.

* * * * *

This essay is from the online summer 2009 edition of the Environment, 
Technology and Society Newsletter of the American Sociological Association, 
at envirosoc.org

Also by David Orton: A tribute to Naess called "Remembering Arne Naess 
(1912-2009)" can be found in the Winter '08 edition of this newsletter and on 
the internet at home.ca.inter.net and culturechange.org