Towards a Postsecular Society

Deep Ecology

The terms ‘Deep ecology’ and ‘Ecosophy’ were introduced by Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer Professor Arne Naess in 1973, and attempt to convey something beyond ecology as a branch of the biological sciences. At the same time there has been a history of nature writing since the mid-19th century that either verges on the mystical or is explicitly spiritual, including Walt Whitman, Henry Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir, John Burroughs, Richard Jefferies, Aldo Leopold, Jiddu Krishnamurti and Annie Dillard. More recently the ‘Gaia’ hypothesis, as put forward by scientist James Lovelock, has had a wide influence. Journals like ‘Resurgence’ edited by Satish Kumar promote the spiritual aspects of ecology, while the lesser-known ‘The Trumpeter’ provides a forum for deep ecology and ecosophical thinking. All these strands can find a common ancestry or debt in the pioneering work of John Muir (1838-1914), credited with being the founding father of the ecological movement (he set up the National Park system in the USA in response to his perception of the wilderness as under threat). Less well understood is his profoundly spiritual vision of the natural world, a spirituality perhaps inherited from his pastor father, but at the same time in revolt against the constraints of Victorian Christianity. While conventional ecological thinking today bases its arguments on survival of the biosphere, and can be reduced to a utilitarian philosophy, the spiritual or holistic impulse in Muir and his modern-day inheritors speaks of an additional imperative: atranscendent vision of nature. This transcendence can only be understood by drawing on mystical traditions, or by examining Buddhism, or through the ideas of transpersonal psychology, or by pitting the rational mind against the limits of science, or by engaging with the aesthetics of the sublime in art. In other words by engaging thoroughly with the whole postsecular context.