Deep Ecology

• Main Author: Brennan, Andrew
• Format: Other/Unknown Material
• Language: unknown
• Published: Wiley 2013
• Subjects: Breivik; Fridtjof; Nils; Norway; Fridtjof Nansen
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/9781444367072.wbiee615; https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/9781444367072.wbiee615

Abstract One of the most influential positions in environmental philosophy ( see Environmental Ethics), deep ecology emerged in the 1970s as the philosophical expression of a wider cultural movement in Scandinavia. The term “deep ecology” is often used loosely to refer to any environmental ethical position that attributes intrinsic value or moral standing to some or all natural things, often combined with a relational view of human subjects (as defined by their place in larger ecological, social, and economic systems). In this essay the focus will largely be on the deep ecology movement understood in a stricter sense, based on the philosophical work of Arne Næss. That movement – associated with the term friluftsliv (roughly, “outdoor life”) – emphasized the importance of outdoor activity both as a spontaneous way of being at home in the world, and also as an important element in human education and socialization. While the term friluftsliv was used widely in nineteenth‐century Norway and even figured in a poem by Henrik Ibsen, the twentieth‐century explorer Fridtjof Nansen famously introduced the term as a contrast to tourism , the latter implying a merely shallow encounter with nature, while life in the free open air was meant to lead us back to our “true home” in “God's free grand nature” (Breivik 1989). In 1971 three Norwegians – Nils Faarlund, Sigmund Kvaløy Setreng, and Arne Næss – set out on an “anti‐expedition” to Nepal, partly with the aim of helping the local Sherpas in their campaign to protect the sacred mountain Tseringma from tourist‐mountaineers. It was during this trip that Næss experienced the “breakthrough” that enabled him to complete the sketch of a new environmental philosophy, or “ecosophy,” Kvaløy formulated an ecopolitics of a “life necessities society” (as opposed to the dominant “industrial growth society”), and Faarlund was inspired to continue his work promoting friluftsliv as a wider approach to outdoor education – one that combined training in mountaineering, skiing, and winter ...