Alan Saunders: Hello, Alan Saunders here joining you for The Philosopher's Zone.

This week, the man who founded the deep ecology movement, the Norwegian philosopher and mountaineer, Arne Naess died last month just a couple of weeks short of his 97th birthday.

He was Norway's most famous philosopher, and he developed the branch of ecological philosophy in which humans are not the centre of the universe, but simply instead one part of the planet.

Arne Naess was also a notable mountaineer, and he wrote much of his work in a remote mountain hut in Norway. Here he is, talking about the mountains that are so important to him.

Arne Naess: Very soon I saw that humans live in symbols so much of their life, really in terms of symbols, and that a mountain is just minerals. I know no culture, no exist, no oral culture have looked at the mountain as minerals. On the contrary they have always looked at very strong symbols, for instance the contact between the earthly life and heaven, and gods are very rarely thought of to live anywhere. They live in heaven or they live on top of the mountains, or higher mountains. Some mountains are holy in many cultures and you speak to them, you ask them for good advice, and so on.

Alan Saunders: The American philosopher and musician, David Rothenberg, delivered one of the eulogies at Arne Naess' funeral in Norway. He first met Naess as a student; later became his assistant, and was also a friend. He worked on the English translation of the book Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, and was himself the author of two books about Arne Naess, Is it Painful to Think? Conversations with Arne Naess, and Wisdom in the Open Air: The Norwegian Roots of Deep Ecology. David Rothenberg joins us now from New York. David, welcome to The Philosopher's Zone.

David Rothenberg: Thanks for inviting me.

Alan Saunders: David, as I said, you were a student of Naess' and later a friend; what was he like as a person?

David Rothenberg: He was just a wonderful, fascinating, quirky character, always surprising you with doing some goofy thing or another, you know. For somebody so famous as a serious philosopher he also was always playing jokes on people and climbing into the window of the 10th floor of a university building's class, and always behaving rudely whenever possible, just like a little kid, he was always playful, he was like a kind of mischievous little boy his whole life, and some people liked that and some people said, 'Oh, not Naess again. Again, another Naess trick'. And he parlayed his whole life, a playful way of being into a whole philosophy of life and a vision for how to make the world a better place.

Alan Saunders: So he did in fact live according to philosophical principles?

David Rothenberg: Well somewhat. He lived famously in his hut Tvergastein, which means 'Crossing the Stones' high up in the alpine regions of Norway, a few hours' walk uphill, in the treeless tundra from the train line between Oslo and Bergen. He lived there a lot of the time, but also he was always jetsetting around the world, climbing mountains and going on odd expeditions with his many friends. And so you could say some of the time he lived the principles, other times he was spreading the gospel of getting closer to nature and re-thinking a whole way of connecting to the natural world. but he was so warm and humorous about this, rather than being angry and bitter and acerbic. You didn't stay mad at Arne Naess for long.

Alan Saunders: In your eulogy you said that if you could summarise Naess' deep ecology philosophy in one sentence it would be by way of your favourite quote, 'The smaller one comes to feel compared to the mountain, the nearer one comes to sharing in its greatness. I do not know why this is so.'

David Rothenberg: That's right, that's one of the first things I read by Arne Naess, in an essay 'Modesty and the Conquest of Mountains', and that really got me interested in him. Somehow it seemed like a sense of humility that you're up there in the mountains but you don't make yourself too great, you don't think that you are the centre of it, but you recognise this greatness of a land towering above you, and there you are, this little person. You know, it's kind of a version of the idea of the sublime perhaps, but the smaller you feel compared to this, the nearer you can be part of it. You don't make yourself too much the centre of everything. But philosophically, Naess spoke of self-realisation, that you would realise your fullest self by spreading out into the environment around you, by not ruling the environment but by fitting into it.

Alan Saunders: Let's look at his personal history. He was one of the last surviving members of the Vienna Circle, which was a group of very hard-headed scientific philosophers who met in Viennese coffee houses before the coming of the Nazis, and as a member of the circle back in those days, he had a very Vienna Circle view of things, didn't he? He held that there exists only one form of reality, only one way of understanding reality, the scientific, and that there was only one form of science, the natural sciences. Anything else was metaphysics, which doesn't mean anything. This is hard-line positivism, isn't it?

David Rothenberg: Yes that what he was doing when he was about 18 years old, there with the Vienna Circle. But what's interesting is after that when he returned to Norway in the 1930s, he decided to apply that to philosophy, and they had this idea you should make philosophy a kind of social science and you would ask people what they thought truth meant, ask people in the street do kind of social science and philosophy. I'm not sure how much exactly had that derived from the Viennese Circle world, but no doubt that it did. And then what's interesting is just in the last year or two, like the mainstream of philosophy, is taking this idea seriously and calling it experimental philosophy, invoking the name of Arne Naess years after he had drifted off what philosophers think about, at least what philosophers think about everywhere else but Australia, where environmental philosophy is sort of in the centre of things. And now that he's sort of been reined back.

But it's certainly to his early works logic and language, kind of define what words mean, similar to the preoccupations of people like Wittgenstein who were in the centre of the Vienna Circle. It was only in the 1960s after decades as a mountaineer, that Naess then applied his interest in nature to something philosophical. Before that they were I'd say, separate things in his life, the philosophical positivist semantic side, and then the outdoorsman mountain-climbing side.

Alan Saunders: Well how does this happen? How does this turn to ecological philosophy come about?

David Rothenberg: I think what Arne has said is that like many people all over the world, reading Rachael Carson's Silent Spring had a big effect on him. He realised that nature is something we really have to take seriously as re-thinking our whole culture and civilisation. He took me to this spot behind his cabin and he said, 'Look, here's where we used to dump the garbage for decades, here are all the rusted tin cans, and I didn't think about littering, I didn't think about the environment here in my beautiful mountain cabin, until some time in the 1960s' when he had this turn. And at the same time he also said 'I'm now going to spend as little time as possible at the university. I'm going to do my philosophy in the mountains. I'm going to work as an activist, get people to care about these issues, and make my ecological concern a philosophical concern as well.'

Alan Saunders: Another influence upon him was the radical 17th century philosopher, Spinoza. How does Spinoza feed into deep ecology?

David Rothenberg: Well Spinoza you know, was such an interesting character. Kicked out of Judaism and Christianity, believed that ethics could be argued in a kind of geometric manner, like Aristotle did, a vigorous step-by-step talking about very abstract things. He also believed nature was something that God and nature were the same thing, and God was there in nature, and kind of flowing all around us, a very kind of non-Western kind of view, but one that made Nature all the more important and alive. And this also had a big influence on Arne Naess, who started to argue for the same thing. Nature is something not to worship, but something of supreme importance, of supreme, intrinsic value. But Spinoza said 'God as nature', 'Deus sive Natura' and this was something Arne tried to put into practice and put into environmental discussion and say 'Don't think you just have to talk about policy and facts and calculate, as if that's the only way to be rational when dealing with nature. You may feel that nature is a part of you, and that's objective. That's something you can bring to the table in a debate.

Alan Saunders: Now he is famous, as I've said, as the founder of deep ecology. The very name implies that there must be such a thing as 'shallow ecology'. So what's the difference and what really is deep ecology? What's deep about it?

David Rothenberg: Well here you usually get something that people might disagree with what I'm about to tell you. But it begins in 1973 and the big international conference in Roumania on the shores of the Black Sea, Arne Naess did the paper, and he said, 'Look, you know, ecology can go in two directions, the shallow direction or the deep direction. The shallow direction is to just tweak slightly what we're doing now: come up with some cleaner technology, get rid of some pollution, and just kind of adjust the business as usual a little bit and say we are now being ecological, we're being environmentalist. But the deep way is to say Look, the fact that we're running out of resources, that we're kind of turning the planet into a rubbish heap. You know this is a sign that there's deep problems with the very conception of our civilisation. We need to re-think what it means to be human; nature is much closer to our own identity and our own sense of self. And from that moment, people have gone and ran with this idea in different directions.

Some people have said deep ecology, it's only the most radical ecology where you unplug, turn off, get off the grid, go back to the land, get rid of all technology that's new, all electricity, anything in the modern world, and return - you know some people say 'Back to the Pleistocene', that's what deep ecology would be. And there's an attempt to make it a kind of political manifesto and Naess together with George Sessions put together a platform of deep ecology, eight points of things you have to believe in, that include reducing the human population just a few hundred million of us, otherwise it's hopeless. Very extreme things; and when I talk about deep ecology I tend to avoid that side of it and say that it's not at its most influential as a political movement, with the manifesto, getting rid of modern society. But it's had much more influence by touching those people who really believe that we can change our way of living by really thinking differently about what it means to be a human being.

And I really traced things that, say, Al Gore wrote in the 1980s, even before he was Vice President in his book, Earth and the Balance. He said 'We need a whole new conception of what it means to be human in relation to nature.' And I really think he got that from Arne Naess. Years later you have a lot more people listening to these points of view, that we must do something about climate change, that involves really re-thinking our whole way of living, and it's much more accepted today than it was when Naess started thinking it in the '60s and'70s, when they said, 'What? What does environmentalism have to do with philosophy?'

Alan Saunders: Yes, well as you say, it wasn't originally intended as a political movement, but some deep ecologists have almost turned Arne Naess into a prophet. Do you know what he thought about how other people saw him and his ideas?

David Rothenberg: Well you know, I think he liked attention, and who doesn't? He liked the fact that he was having an influence on people. There were a lot of feminists like Val Plumwood for example -

Alan Saunders: This is the Australian who died last year.

David Rothenberg: - who said 'Look, you know, Arne, this is such a male, individual hero-centred, me-me-me kind of you spreading out into nature and self-realisation, and you don't realise that there's a lot of other things going on here that are not encompassed in your view. You don't really understand the feminine, you don't understand what women have had to deal with.' And Arne would say, 'Yes, yes, yes, everything you say is really important, but it's all a part of deep ecology, my view includes yours. There's a place for you.'

And not everybody liked that, they wanted to disagree, and he said he would like to include his enemies. But spend a few days hiking with him, and go on some rock climbs, and you start to want to agree with him because he was so kind of embracing and he really did listen to people. You know, people who knew him when he was younger said he used to be really competitive and he was much more difficult. I met him when he was in his 70s. He had his competitive side then, but he was starting to mellow into this more embracing view, and of course in his early '90s he wrote this book that became the No.1 Bestseller in Norway called Life's Philosophy, in which he said things like 'All my life I've believed logic, rigour, argument is important. Now I realise emotions are what really matter.' Telling the same kind of things, but with a different perspective.

Alan Saunders: Well on that feeling thought, David Rothenberg. thank you very much for joining us.

David Rothenberg: Thanks for inviting me, and you should know Arne Naess had a great affection for Australia. He often travelled there and did deep ecology workshops together with John Seed, and I think in Australia more than anywhere else also academic philosophy has been willing to take this environmental stuff seriously.

Alan Saunders: Well, funny you should say that, because we have John Seed joining us in just a couple of minutes.

David Rothenberg: Send him my regards.

Alan Saunders: David Rothenberg describes himself as a musician, composer, author and philosopher naturalist. And here you can hear him, jamming with birds a few years ago at an aviary in Pittsburgh, in the U.S.

MUSIC

Alan Saunders: This is The Philosopher's Zone on ABC Radio National and today we're looking at the ideas and life of the Norwegian philosopher, the late Arne Naess, who founded the branch of environmental philosophy known as deep ecology.

Now as David Rothenberg has told us, Arne Naess was certainly very well known and very influential in Australia. And of course he mentioned John Seed, who's very well aware of this because several decades go, he organised Naess' first trip to Australia. As a long-time rainforest campaigner, John Seed saw the need for a philosophical understanding of the sort of destruction that was going on in Australian forests, and so deep ecology was very attractive to him.

John Seed is the Director of the Rainforest Information Centre, and he joins me now. John, welcome to The Philosopher's Zone.

John Seed: Thanks, Alan.

Alan Saunders: Your interest in Arne Naess and his work goes back a long way, doesn't it? At least 20 years.

John Seed: It does. I actually came to it from being an activist, starting with the campaign to protect the rainforests at Terania Creek. I was involved in all of the rainforest campaigns in Australia, and even though we had a lot of success in all of those campaigns, with National Parks and World Heritage areas following the protests, nonetheless, we began to understand that for every forest that was being saved in those years, 100 or 1,000 forests around the world were being lost, and that unless we could address the underlying psychological disease that allows modern humans to imagine that we can somehow profit from the destruction of what are, after all, our own life support systems, these apparent victories were going to be merely symbolic. And in searching for a clue to that psychological dimension, I came upon the philosophy of deep ecology and the work of Arne Naess. And I was so impressed by this, that I began to mount a campaign to spread the philosophy of deep ecology and that involved, among other things, inviting Arne to come to Australia in the late '80s and organising lectures and appearances for him.

Alan Saunders: One thinks of him naturally as a man of the cold north; how did he take to Australia?

John Seed: Well he's a man for all seasons. He was like a very joyful leprechaun as I recall.

Alan Saunders: So how do you think that deep ecology has turned Australian thought on this subject on hits head?

John Seed: The fundamental insight of deep ecology is that underlying all of the symptoms of environmental problems, there is the illusion of separation between human beings and the natural world. The fact that it is an illusion can be demonstrated very quickly by anyone, by merely holding their breath for five minutes while they think about it, and very quickly we understand that we can call it 'The Environment' and make it sound like something far away, but it's actually all cycling through us all the time. And this illusion of separation comes from anthropocentrism or human-centeredness, this idea that human beings are the centre of everything, the crown of creation, the measure of all being; that the earth consists of human being on the one hand, and resources for human beings on the other hand. That the rest of life has no value other than its instrumental value for humans.

I believe that this way of thinking has changed considerably. Of course how much of this was due to the philosophy of deep ecology and how much due to a sort of a change that's taking place in the way that human beings see the world, I don't know. But this is the fundamental insight of deep ecology and I do feel that people were far more ready to defend an anthropocentric point of view 25 years ago than they are today.

Alan Saunders: David Rothenberg who's just made the point for us that there's a fair degree of environmental thought going on in mainstream Australian philosophy, rather more than in a lot of other places, but there are different ways of thinking about it and probably Australia's best-known philosopher today is Peter Singer. He argues that because children and apes have relative similar cognitive skills and levels of consciousness, they have relatively similar interests, and should be treated in the same way. But I wonder whether that's the way a deep ecologist would think? Would a deep ecologist make a distinction between forms of life based on reasoning skills?

John Seed: For myself, and I believe for most of the people who profess deep ecology that I've met, this way of looking at things would be far less important than for instance saying that all of these different species are like strands in the web of life and that as we destroy the other strands, we destroy ourselves. So reasoning power wouldn't stand out that much from a deep ecology perspective.

Alan Saunders: Now you said that when it came to defending the rainforest, you sort of identified as it were, a mental disease that needed to be addressed here, rather than simply a mistaken philosophy. Now one of your ways of doing that has involved developing deep ecology into an experiential process. Can you tell us about that?

John Seed: Well it sort of started with a statement of Arne Naess' where he said that ecological ideas are not enough, we need an ecological identity, an ecological self. When asked how we're to develop or nourish this ecological identity, Naess replied that he thought that we needed community therapies to develop ecological identity, and it's not possible to find a single example of an indigenous society that doesn't have these sorts of processes that recognise the interconnectedness between humanity and the rest of the earth family; that respect and that honour that, and that applaud and remind people that we are part of this, that we're not different from this.

It made me realise that this isn't only a modern problem. I had originally thought that because we modern people live so far from nature in many cases, that we suffered uniquely from this tragedy of anthropocentrism, but the fact that even hunter-gatherers regularly have rituals and ceremonies where they remind themselves and they remind each other of being part of the web of life, that these are all our relations, makes me think that it must go deeper than that, and that all human beings perhaps have this tendency to disappear into merely social definitions of identity, and to forget that unless their social definitions harmonise with, are aligned with the ecological-biological reality that underpins them, that they're not going to be supported.

Alan Saunders: John Seed, thank you very much for joining us. John is the Director of the Rainforest Information Centre.

That's it for this week's show. It's produced by Kyla Slaven with the technical know-how of Charlie McKune in the studio, and I'm Alan Saunders.