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Devall and Sessions on Defending the Earth
The theory of deep ecology has had a profound effect on many environmental political movements over the past generation. While this notion was first advanced by Arne Naess in Western Europe, deep ecology found its broadest and most influential popularization, especially in North America, in the work of Bill Devall and George Sessions. Their 1985 work, Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered, outlines their vision of deep ecology, and it is an important source for anyone interested in the ethics and politics of deep ecology.
Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered by Bill Devall and George Sessions (1985) was published at the heyday of "the Reagan revolution" in the United States. Coming in a time during which characters like Secretary of the Interior James Watt could opine in public about the needless effort to protect nature because "the Saviour's Second Coming" would soon make all secular human projects superfluous, it is not surprising that this work struck such a deep chord with many who worried about the health of the natural environment. In many ways, the book is, at best, a schematic digest of many other schools of ethical thinking about nature and the need to guard its integrity rather than any sort of a truly systematic and convincing philosophical treatise. Still, Deep Ecology was embraced immediately by many different factions in the environmental movement, and it clearly remains an indispensable foundational work for anyone who worries about how to "live as if nature mattered."
Nevertheless, Devall and Sessions's treatise still can be a very frustrating work to master. At times, it reads like little more than a densely annotated outline of what scores of other thinkers have argued about nature's intrinsic worth. At other times, it can be a maudlin profession of faith in "earth wisdom" in which standpoint philosophies and ecotopian visions drown out more reflective considerations of the environmental crisis. And, finally, it also is a how-to-do-it manual for deep ecologists intent on direct action that archives key ideological positions to hit on at weekly meetings as it details lists of like-minded groups already at work all around the world. As a work of sophisticated environmental philosophy, however, Deep Ecology is...