Gandhi And Deep Ecology
By Thomas Weber
The central importance of Gandhi to
nonviolent activism is widely acknowledged. There are also other
significant peace-related bodies of knowledge that have gained such
popularity in the West in the relatively recent past that they have
changed the directions of thought and have been important in encouraging
social movements - yet they have not been analysed in terms of
antecedents, especially Gandhian ones. The new environmentalism in the
form of deep ecology, very closely mirror Gandhi's philosophy. This
article analyses the Mahatma's contribution to the intellectual
development of Arne Naess and argues that those who want to make an
informed study of deep ecology and particularly those who are interested
in the philosophy of Naess, should go back to Gandhi for a fuller
picture.
Gandhi as a Source of Influence
Gandhi has had a profound and celebrated
influence on the nonviolence movement through Martin Luther King Jr,
Cesar Chavez, Helder Camara, Thomas Merton, Danilo Dolci, Gene Sharp and
many others. In this article, I examine Gandhi's influence on three
significant bodies of knowledge that have recently gained wide
popularity in the West and which have also stimulated important social
movements: deep ecology, peace research and what has become known as
'Buddhist economics', and particularly on the intellectual development
of leading figures in these fields: Arne Naess, Johan Galtung and E. F.
Schumacher.
Many environmental activists who claim that 'deep
ecology' is their guiding philosophy have barely heard the name of Arne
Naess, who coined the term. While Naess readily admits his debt to
Gandhi, works about him tend to gloss over this connection or ignore it.
For example, while a recent article on Naess' environmental philosophy
and the Gita (Jacobsen, 1996: 228-230) refers to the link, the chapter
on deep ecology in Merchant's book (1992: 88) which surveys 'radical
ecology' contains a long list of its sources, including the debt owed to
interpreters of Eastern philosophy such as Alan Watts, Daisetz Suzuki
and Gary Snyder, without even mentioning Gandhi. The deep ecology of
Naess not only talks of a personal identification with nature, but also
of self-realization being dependent upon it. For those who know Gandhian
philosophy well, this line of reasoning is readily recognized. However,
Naess' writings on Gandhi are not particularly well known and Gandhi's
influence on him has not received due recognition.
Peace research is a diverse field and Gandhi's influence
has only touched certain areas of it. While he is generally not
mentioned, and potential causal links are rarely investigated, the
literature on conflict resolution is commonly quite 'Gandhian' in its
approach. In much of the international relations, defence, security,
ethnic conflict and related peace areas the possible relevance of
Gandhian philosophy is not even an issue considered worthy of
investigating. Although the connection between the two receives scant
attention or is very much implicit (see Sorensen, 1992: 143-144, note
15), and a recent speech has called for the 'adding of Gandhi to
Galtung' (Herman, 1994), the work of Johan Galtung, one of the leading
academics in the peace research area, is centrally and obviously
influenced by Gandhian philosophy· While Galtung makes several
references to this influence on his thought in the introductory chapters
to his Essays in Peace Research and elsewhere (e.g. Gage, 1995: 7),
even Lawler (1995), the recent chronicler of Galtung's peace research,
does little more than mention it in passing. For him Galtung seems to
have moved from positivism to Buddhism, while according to Galtung
himself it was Gandhi all the time'.
Unlike the works of Naess and Galtung,
Schumacher's writings have made it onto popular bestseller lists· The
Gandhian connection, at least at a superficial level, was originally
also more explicit· However, Schumacher's 'small is beautiful'
philosophy eventually came to be known as 'Buddhist economics and
gradually the links with Gandhi took a back seat. His concern for
Third-World poverty led to the formation of the Technology Group to
develop tools and work methods which are appropriate to the people using
them. While this practical work can only be lauded, its philosophical
under-pinning should also be remembered.
Arne Naess and Deep Ecology
Although a conservation ethic had been
around for decades (Nash, 1989) before the publication of books such as
Carson's Silent Spring (1962) and studies such as The Limits to Growth
(Meadows et al., 1972), Arne Naess took environmental philosophy into
new areas with his call for a 'deep ecology'.
In 1973, Naess provided a summary of a
lecture given the year before in Bucharest at the World Future Research
Conference. That short article (Naess, 1973) was to take on
paradigm-shifting proportions. It introduced us to a terminology that
has since become commonplace.
Naess (1973: 95) points out that a shallow
but influential ecological movement and a deep but less influential one
compete for our attention· He characterizes the 'shallow' ecological
movement as one that fights pollution and resource depletion in order to
preserve human health and affluence, while the 'deep' ecological
movement operates out of a deep-seated respect and even veneration for
ways and forms of life, and accords them an 'equal right to live and
blossom'.
In a later elaboration, Naess puts the
contrast between the two in its most stark form: shallow ecology sees
that 'natural diversity is valuable as a resource for us'. He notes that
'it is nonsense to talk about value except as value for mankind', and
adds that in this formulation 'plant species should be saved because of
their value as genetic reserves for human agriculture and medicine'. On
the other hand, deep ecology sees that 'natural diversity has its own
(intrinsic) value' and he notes that 'equating value with value for
humans reveals a racial prejudice', and adds that 'plant species should
be saved because of their intrinsic value' (Naess, 1984: 257).
During a camping trip in California, Arne
Naess and George Sessions (1985: 69-70) jointly formulated a set of
basic principles which they presented as a minimum description of the
general features of the deep ecology movement: the 'well being and
flourishing' of human and non-human life have intrinsic value; the
richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realization of
these values and are therefore also intrinsic values; humans have no
right to reduce this richness or diversity except where it is necessary
to satisfy vital needs; the flourishing of human life and culture is
compatible with a large decrease in the human population, and a
flourishing of non-human life requires it; human interference with
nature is excessive and increasing; and, therefore, economic,
technological and ideological policies must change. This ideological
change will mean an appreciation of the quality of life rather than the
standard of living; and those who subscribe to these points 'have an
obligation directly or indirectly to try to implement the necessary
changes'.
Naess loved nature and identified with it
from early childhood. As a philosopher he researched and was influenced
by Spinoza (Rothenberg, 1993: 91-101) who maintained a spiritual vision
of the unity and sacredness of nature and believed that the highest
level of knowledge was an intuitive and mystical kind of knowing where
subject/object distinctions disappeared as the mind united with the
whole of nature. However, as important as those inputs were, the
influence of Gandhi is also clearly visible in his formulation of deep
ecology. In fact Naess himself admits in a brief third-person account of
his philosophy that 'his work on the philosophy of ecology, or
ecosophy, developed out of his work on Spinoza and Gandhi and his
relationship with the mountains of Norway' (Devall & Sessions, 1985:
225).
Gandhi experimented with and wrote a great
deal about simple living in harmony with the environment (Power, 1991)
but he lived before the advent of the articulation of the deep
ecological strands of environmental philosophy. His ideas about human
connectedness with nature, therefore, rather than being explicit, must
be inferred from an overall reading of the Mahatma's writings. Naess
(1986:11) explains that 'Gandhi made manifest the internal relation
between self-realisation, non-violence and what sometimes has been
called biospherical egalitarianism', and points out that he was
'inevitably' influenced by the Mahatma's metaphysics 'which contributed
to keeping him (the Mahatma) going until his death'. Moreover, 'Gandhi's
utopia is one of the few that shows ecological balance, and today his
rejection of the Western World's material abundance and waste is
accepted by progressives of the ecological movement' (Naess, 1974: 10).
While Gandhi allowed injured animals to be
killed humanely to save them from unreasonable pain and at times even
because they caused undue nuisance, his nonviolence encompassed a
reverence for all life. In his hut at the Sevagram Ashram there is a
large pair of wooden tongs which were used to pick up snakes so that
they could be taken beyond the perimeter and released as an alternative
to killing them.
A review of the Gandhian literature (while
keeping in mind the time in which it was written as a reason for
anthropocentric expression) readily reveals statements such as: 'If our
sense of right and wrong had not become blunt, we would recognise that
animals had rights, no less than men' (Hingorani, 1985: 10); 'I do
believe that all God's creatures have the right to live as much as we
have' (Harijan, 19 January 1937); and 'We should feel a more living bond
between ourselves and the rest of the animate world' (Patel &
Sykes, 1987: 50). The clearest indication of Gandhi's respect for
nature, however, comes through his interpretation of the Hindu worship
of the cow. Gandhi saw cow protection as one of the most wonderful
phenomena in human evolution. 'It takes the human being beyond his
species. The cow to me means the entire sub-human world. Man, through
the cow, is enjoined to realise his identity with all that lives' (Young
lndia, 6 October 1921).
Another way to illustrate Gandhi's
concerns with the oneness of life is to look at his writings on ahimsa.
Usually translated as
nonviolence, it can be seen as the fountainhead of Truth - the ultimate
goal of life. From his prison cell in 1930, Gandhi wrote to his
ashramites that 'Ahimsa and Truth are so intertwined that it is
practically impossible to distangle and separate them. They are like two
sides of a coin ...' (Gandhi, 1932: 6).
For Gandhi, ahimsa meant 'love' in the
Pauline sense and was violated by 'holding on to what the world needs'
(Gandhi, 1932: 5). As a Hindu, Gandhi had a strong sense of the unity of
all life. For him, nonviolence meant not only the non-injury of human
life, but as noted above, of all living things. This was important
because it was the way to Truth (with a capital 'T') which he saw as
Absolute - as God or an impersonal all-pervading reality - rather than
truth (with a lower case 't') which was relative, the current position
on the way to Truth.
Naess had been an admirer of Gandhi since
1930 (Naess, 1986: 9). When he read Romain Rolland's Gandhi biography
(Rolland, 1924) as a young philosophy student in Paris in 1931, he must
often have come across Gandhi's statements on Truth and the essential
oneness of all life. In some of his works, Naess notes that 'nature
conservation is non-violent at its very core' and quotes Gandhi to this
effect:
I believe in advaita (non-duality), I
believe in the essential unity of man and, for that matter, of all that
lives. Therefore I believe that if one man gains spiritually, the whole
world gains with him and, if one man fails, the whole world fails to
that extent. (Young India, 4 December 1924)
As this implies, for Arne Naess deep
ecology is not fundamentally about the value of nature per se, it is
about who we are in the larger scheme of things. He notes the
identification of the 'self' with 'Self' in terms that it is used in the
Bhagavad Gita (that is, as the unity which is one) as the source of
deep ecological attitudes. In other words, he links the tenets of his
approach to ecology with what may be termed self-realization. And here
the influence of the Mahatma is most clearly discernible. Naess notes
(1986: 9) that while Gandhi may have been concerned about the political
liberation of his homeland, 'the liberation of the individual human
being was his supreme aim'.
The link between self-realization and
Naess' environmental philosophy can be clearly seen in his discussion of
the connection between nonviolence and self-realization in his analysis
of the context of Gandhian political ethics. Starting with the 'one
basic proposition of a normative kind' when investigating Gandhi's
teachings on group conflict - 'Seek complete self-realisation' (the
manifestation of one's potential to the greatest possible degree') -
Naess summarizes this connection as:
Figure 1. Naess' Systematization of Gandhian Ethics
- Self-realization presupposes a search for truth.
- In the last analysis, all living beings are one.
- Himsa (violence) against oneself makes complete self-realization impossible.
- Himsa against a living being is himsa against oneself.
- Himsa against a living being makes complete self-realization impossible.
(adapted from Naess, 1965: 28-33)
This conceptual construction evolved into
ever more complex and graphic presentations. In his 1974 work, Naess
provides various systematizations of Gandhi's teachings on group
struggle where self-realization is the top norm and which contain the
critical hypothesis that all living beings are ultimately one, as set
out in in Figure 1.
In a discussion with David Rothenburg over
human destruction of the environment without adequate reason (for
example, where a parent kills the last animal of a species to save his
or her child from its attack), Naess is asked whether protection of
nature should occur because we should think not only of ourselves or
because natural things are part of us also. Naess refuses to separate
the two approaches. He answers with another allusion to Gandhi: 'When he
was asked, "How do you do these altruistic things all year long?" he
said, "I am not doing something altruistic at all. I am trying to
improve in Self-realisation"' (Rothenberg, 1993: 141-142). There need be
no divide between the intrinsically valuable and the useful. And, in a
Gandhian way of feeling rather than intellectualizing, he adds: 'if you
hear a phrase like, "All life is fundamentally one", you should be open
to tasting this, before asking immediately, "What does this mean?"'
(Rothenburg, 1993:151).
Along with other deep ecological
theorists, Naess is attempting to clarify what the deep ecology movement
stands for. Ecological philosophies are continually expanding, and
other writers have also added their analytical skills to the deep
ecology literature (see, for example, Devall & Sessions, 1985).
Recently, we have seen the rise of eco-feminism, Lovelock's Gaia
hypothesis and aggressively radical movements and philosophies such as
Earth First! While Gandhi certainly would not have welcomed some of
these later developments (for example, the employment of 'ecotage'
techniques such as tree-spiking and the disabling of logging equipment),
and Naess does not, the Mahatma's influence is clearly discernible
through the writings of Arne Naess.
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