HOW I CAUGHT DEEP ECOLOGY – REFLECTIONS ON THE
4Oth ANNIVERSARY
Sept. 9 , 2022 by John Seed
Back in 1982, somewhere between the Nightcap and Franklin actions I was
searching to understand the ubiquitous psychological or spiritual sickness that
allows modern humans to imagine that we can somehow profit from the
destruction of our own life support systems. Paul Ehrlich: “We are sawing off
the branch that we’re sitting on”. James Lovelock: “Its as if the brain
had decided it was the most important organ in the body and started mining the
liver.”
Somehow I found myself reading an article by the zen master Robert Aitken Roshi
(years later he would invite me to offer a Council of All Beings for his Diamond
Sangha on the Big Island of Hawaii) titled
"Gandhi, Dogen and
Deep Ecology". Something woke in me to see the words “deep ecology”
and Roshi’s short description, so I requested and he sent me a photocopied
article cited in footnote 7: philosopher George Session’ essay, "Spinoza,
Perennial Philosophy, and Deep Ecology,"
(unpublished paper, Sierra College, 1979). This added to my mounting
excitement and I wrote to Sessions who acceded to my request and sent me a
photocopy of a paper he had cited:
“The Deep Ecology Movement” by California sociologist Bill Devall.
After reading this, I knew I was onto something of immense importance and
soon thereafter caught a train 12 hours to Sydney, borrowed a friends
library card that gave me access to the stacks at Sydney University’s Fisher
Library and plunged into a couple weeks of intense study, following the
trail from Devall’s footnotes.
The culprit was anthropocentrism, human centeredness, and the illusion of
separation from the natural world to which it gave rise!
I had become infected with deep ecology and now, exactly 40 years later, it has
not finished with me yet. It felt like I had become infected by a big, true
idea.
Interesting metaphor, infection.
In July this year Joanna Macy, now aged 93, held a webinar titled
"Climate
Change as Spiritual Practice" where she said:
“What I’m aware of is how many people are showing up now, and often, kids
and young people too, and then people more like my age too, that there is a deep
love of Earth. See, what science is showing is that our Earth is a living system
and that along with that systems thinking, deep ecology helps you live and own
these larger realms of who you are and be able to be so grateful for that, that
you can feel them working through you. …
This came to me in my mid-40’s I guess, when I encountered a deep
ecologist, rainforest activist in Australia named John Seed, he’s still alive.
The rest of us caught it from him. Because he was defending the rainforest from
logging and he was able to stand there facing the police and the loggers and it
changed the sense of who he was. He was the rainforest defending itself. Now
once you have that shift in identity, that this larger identity acts through
you, because the Earth needs human hands, the Earth needs human voices…”
Back in 1982, burning with born-again zeal, a convert to the Church of
the Immaculate Biosphere, I made hundreds of copies of Devall’s paper and sent
them far and wide, produced a line of bumper stickers that read “SUBVERT THE
DOMINANT PARADIGM“ and then wrote my own interpretation of deep ecology, “Beyond
Anthropocentrism” first published in May 1983 in George Session’s “Ecophilosophy
5 ”.