(rough draft, preliminary ideas)

Humankind is an integral feature of environment and not separate from it and not more special or valuable than any other facet of the landscape.

“Shallow” environmental movements value human interests first (conservation is for human’s benefit), but deep ecology places equal value on non-human species, ecosystems and processes in nature. This creates a new environmental ethics. All the big philosophical questions are addressed regarding the nature of reality (for example, is it a physicalist mechanism or something more vital and organic?) and the role of human life (for example, is nature a deposit of resources for human manipulation, or is it rather the fabric in which our lives are woven and on which our lives depend?)

Central concepts:
Interdependence (inter-being)
Nothing is discrete and separate, our “selves” are bodily and are inextricably linked with all the processes around us (deep ecology isn’t just about environmental systems but about human relations to their environment). The body is an expression of its environment, so one’s self is more a strand in a web than a distinct (and separated) identity. Actions inevitably affect others, and vice versa, so being interconnected necessitates a new ethical concern for others (human and non-human). Empathy takes precedence over self-interest.

Animism (–> neo-animism –> panpsychism)
I’m re-visioning this anthropological term (animism); normally it signifies an ancient or “primitive” vision of nature as full of spirits. That spiritistic dualism (the seen physical dimension plus an additional unseen and non-physical ghostworld) is defunct outside its tribal setting, and I have no desire for a return to a “prehistoric” world-view. So in place of a world “full of spirits” the world is full of value. Each animal of all species, each plant of all species, and all places have intrinsic value rather than only the conditional value attributed to them by humans. Interactions with them should be on the basis of dialogue and respect rather than manipulation and control. Whether a rock or tree actually has a soul or sentience (“mind”), the assumption is that humans cannot presume superiority over something for its lack of speaking-capacity or for their human capacity to manipulate it, and so should assume The Other’s equal value.

Panpsychism is the theory that “mind” or interiority is a feature of all elements of the universe. Rather than interior subjective experience (“mind”) as an “emergent property” of matter, mind is seen as existing at some primitive level already in everything and becomes more notably recognizable by humans in brain/body processes. If there’s evidence for panpsychism, then intrinsic value (based on inherent sentience) must be recognized in all non-human phenomena. In the simplest terms, the universe is alive in some sense. The project here is to ensoul nature once again. Animists saw spirits in everything, Judeo-Christian tradition removed spirit from the world and split it between “God” and humans; panpsychism sees the processes of nature as the fabric of which our Body-Minds are expressions, and thus “Soul” is a feature of visible, physical nature again.

Eco-anarchism
Cultures founded on large-scale agriculture and advanced technology are inevitably hierarchical and manipulative. This impinges on the freedom of those lower in the hierarchy, and it leads to environmental devastation as well as a diminishment of person’s involvement with their own bodies and lives. Smaller scale economics and politics is necessary for greater freedoms for all persons rather than the aristocratic few.

Eco-psychology
The fullest expression of human health is found in more natural settings, rather than in confining spaces. Sedentary life, with electronic media as a kind of mental soporific, is dehumanizing and negatively affects both physical and mental well-being. People are cut off from place (the sense of identity gained from growing up and finding in one intimately familiar place both one’s livelihood and also interactions with community and friends). Today people are cut off from themselves, inasmuch as they must arrange their behavior to suit artificial timetables and spend large portions of their lives serving ends that are not directly related to their own physical well-being and bodily and mental enjoyment/fulfillment.

Central Elements of my version of Deep Ecology
Relation to the world = The world is alive and can be communicated with, through empathy, intuition (bodily felt-sense of connection), participatory observation, and by ritual.

Relation to place = Place is of central concern, because identity is fractured when people are uprooted and transportable. We need a sensuous involvement with a known place, to know the trees and shrubs there, to take our food from nearby rather than purchase pre-packaged food. The sense of everything being disposable, both food and homes, makes identity feel transitory, unstable, insecure. The end result is a lack of full sensuous embodiment, where one feels that they are a body that’s an integral feature of an environment. It leads to a feeling of being solitary and alone, even “stuck” inside of one’s own skin.

Ritual = If nature is to be dialogued with, in a give and take relation, then means for this can be established. Not everything speaks English, but everything does participate in symbols. Symbolic acts = ritual. Rituals also mark life-transitions so persons will progress through their life-stages rather than feel they’re decaying with age starting at about 30… Modernity values youth, though it boasts about lengthened lifespans. And at the same time, old people are devalued. Ritual initiations can reverse this trend and elders will be viewed as progressed (wise) individuals. Rituals bond a community, individuals with others, and also the group with their environment and the seasons.

If nature isn’t a physicalist mechanism, a billiard-ball universe with no meaning and only material interactions determining all events, then a new way of studying nature is needed. Phenomenologists and other holistic-oriented philosopher-scientists have already spelled out this methodology. Learning the world is necessarily participatory. The assumption of materialism is that there’s a world “out there” but the observers of it are limited to a space inside the head; hence their preoccupation with “objectivity” and rationality and disdain for subjectivity, feeling and body.

Practical means for enacting the above philosophical prescriptions:

I dunno! The ideas on enacting this, making it a life-way, are too vague just now.

At this point, I have a head full of idealism (as seen above). The goal is to find Nature’s “original instructions” and put them into a straightforward “How to be more fully yourself by being more fully engaged with the world around you.” The world around healthy people will be a relatively healthy world, as it’s a reciprocal relation — the only way ugliness survives is via the deadness of people’s senses. When we feel more “Here” we must necessarily want what causes our bodies, imaginative expressions, and our communal interactions to thrive, in joy.

Nature’s Original Instructions are written in both the body and in undomesticated environments (undisrupted ecologies). We’re not blank slates, and nature has laws. So, living fully happens when the template is followed. But creatively rather than only obediently; the template has room for individual flourishes.