The Right to Thrive
Wolves, Deep Ecology, and the Illusion of Separateness
My chest tightens whenever I reread Aldo Leopold’s account of shooting the wolves that eventually transformed his ethics and science.
In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy: how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable slide-rocks. We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain.
– “Thinking Like a Mountain,” from A Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold
One of my first mentors, the late Huey Johnson, assigned the reading of Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac as my first task when I began work at the Resource Renewal Institute in 1990. Huey, the former Secretary for Natural Resources under Jerry Brown’s first administration in California, was the kind of man who would likely be “canceled” today. A strident conservationist who was at times incredibly gruff and occasionally explosive, he could be easily (and wrongly) construed as a man intent on exploiting the power of his status. But Huey was in fact an ardent defender of the rights of all humans and nature. He knew that without a profound paradigm shift, our culture’s war against the natural world would lead to unimaginable suffering and loss for humans and the entire life community. By assigning Leopold’s book, Huey began sculpting my ecological ethics while giving me permission to feel what I grew up knowing but had been educated to deny—that the other animals, the plants and trees, the land and waters—are imbued with unique forms of sentience and intelligence, and I was inexplicably connected to them.
Red fox kits. Photo © Susie O’Keeffe
This was my first introduction to one of the principal concepts of Deep Ecology—the intrinsic worth of all life. Leopold, for those who are unfamiliar with his book, or his essay, was exploring not the intrinsic value of wolves but his discovery of their undeniable role in maintaining ecosystem health. And yet, while his argument for not eradicating wolves was at least partly practical (the essential part wolves play in maintaining healthy deer herds), his essay also weaves in an unspoken experience of animacy when he writes, “Yet behind these obvious and immediate hopes and fears there lies a deeper meaning, known only to the mountain itself. Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.”
Leopold’s term “Thinking Like a Mountain” was taken up by the founders of Deep Ecology, including Arne Naess, the Norwegian philosopher who coined the term “Deep Ecology” to relay humanity’s deep connection with the Earth, and the need for “a total revolution in consciousness [to preserve] the life-supporting systems of our planet.” (Thinking Like A Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings). Naess, along with philosopher George Sessions, sociologist Bill Devall, and several others—including Joanna Macy, John Seed and Pat Fleming—was striving to understand the root causes of the environmental crisis, and to devise a truly effective response. The word “deep” reflected their belief that humanity’s relationships with the rest of the living world and one another needed to be profoundly questioned. “Deep” was in contrast with
shallow and short-term approaches to the environmental crisis [that] stop before affecting fundamental change, often promoting technological fixes that are based on the same consumption-oriented values and methods of the industrial economy. The Deep Ecology approach calls for a redesign of all human made systems based on values and methods that truly preserve the ecological and cultural diversity of natural systems.
– Deep Ecology, Daniel Christian Wahl
To achieve this, Naess and others believed it was essential to transcend the utilitarianism integral to Western European thought and culture, and to adopt a biocentric approach that helped people experience the fact that the world is not simply a collection of resources made for human exploitation. As Naess wrote,“[the] well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves...these values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.”
Photo © Susie O’Keeffe
“Only the mountain has lived long enough to listen objectively to the howl of a wolf.”
Leaving aside the numerous arguments for and against these views, Deep Ecology offers those of Western European descent a way to examine, debate, and develop a biocentric foundation that stems in part from Western culture and thought, without culturally appropriating from Native cultures. It is important to note, however, that Naess, Macy, and others were greatly influenced by many non-Western traditions, including Buddhism. We are, as Reverential Ecologist Satish Kumar states, in the midst of creating a new paradigm that ends the delusions of separation and superiority that largely define, and to this day justify, the ecological and cultural destruction initiated by European conquest and industrialization. The new reality is anchored in the fact that humans are inseparable from one another and the natural world, and that all members of the life community share the right to thrive. We are, in the words of Albert Einstein, learning that:
Human beings experience themselves, their thoughts and feelings as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical illusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires, and affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures, and the whole of nature in its beauty… The greatest tragedy of human existence is the illusion of separateness.
Photo © Liz Thompson
Practice and experience, in addition to intellectual and scientific understanding, are key aspects of Deep Ecology. Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings is very much a book about learning to reconnect with the natural world. In fact, the core of Joanna Macy’s teaching is The Work that Reconnects. Practicing expanding our circles of care and compassion, respect, and reverence for all life relies on another fundamental tenet of Deep Ecology—the Ecological Self. As Joanna Macy states, “the Earth is not resources, not our sewer; the Earth is our larger body.” This reflects Einstein’s statement that our certainty of separation is, in fact, an illusion. Naess and others saw our ability to grow beyond egocentrism and into ecocentrism as indispensable to transforming human behavior, and moving the current anthropocentric culture into an ecocentric one. A full, bodily experience of our connectedness is an essential part of transcending the delusion of separation and self-proclaimed superiority.
Photo © Liz Thompson
“[the] well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves...these values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.”
There’s a great deal that can be written on experiencing and integrating our indivisible bond with the planet, and all members of the life community. Practices that cultivate direct connection largely define Thinking Like A Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings, and there is no shortage of workshops, retreats, books, etc. focused on connecting people to the natural world in some manner. Ultimately, however, it appears that what awakens our kinship with the rest of the life community is the same thing that reveals our connection with other human beings—contact. And this contact, as Thoreau famously declared in The Maine Woods when describing his attempt to climb Ktaadn, has the ability to completely transform us, especially when we are confronted with nature’s wild forces. Close contact erodes our false sense of separation and reveals what Satish Kumar describes as the continuous exchange of life begetting life. As he explains, Deep Ecology is part of a continuum of thought and action that is slowly transforming the current system from one based in competition, domination, and separation to one engaged in a continuous dance of mutuality, reciprocity, connectivity, and interdependence. This circles back to Leopold’s “The Land Ethic” and “Thinking Like a Mountain,” and ultimately to the wolves themselves.
Photo © Liz Thompson
“The greatest tragedy of human existence is the illusion of separateness.”
There is perhaps no wild animal that continues to suffer as greatly under the cruelty this delusion of separation and superiority condones, and even encourages, as the wolves and their cousins the coyotes. Without integrating into the fabric of human culture the understanding that wild canines are part of the life community with their own cultures and right to exist, and that humans are simply one member of this community, as Leopold writes; without an understanding that the Earth is not made up of “resources,” as Macy states; and without Einstein’s experience of our complete interdependence and the beauty of all life; we will fail to help this planet reweave the fabric of life. Interestingly, wolves—and the changes that our minds, hearts, cultures, and economies must undergo for them to thrive—could show us the way.
Photo © Susie O’Keeffe
Susie O’Keeffe lives at the headwaters of the Sheepscot River in Maine and is a Research Associate at the College of the Atlantic. She holds a Master of Science degree with distinction in environmental management from Oxford University, England. She is fluent in French, and her professional experience ranges from comprehensive environmental policy planning to program creation and direction in the fields of local, organic agriculture and wildlife conservation. Susie is a member of the Leadership Council of Rewilding Earth, and she serves on the Board of Northeast Wilderness Trust and Upstream Watch. Her writing has appeared in Spring: A Journal of Archetype and Culture, the Maine Review, Naropa University’s Phylogeny, and the Spoon River Poetry Review.