Free Nature Interview with Bill Devall   Resurgence, March/April 2000 Right here, we are sitting in Presidio Park, in the middle of San Francisco. What kind of place is this to you? Well, we are sitting in a very humanized landscape. These trees were all planted in the last part of the nineteenth century, basically as a plantation by the military. They are all lined up in rows, there is only three species of trees here. The native landscape of San Francisco Peninsula did not have forest like this. It had a rolling, low vegetation, certain native plants. But there is a kind of wildness still here. We hear birds singing, there are flows of fog that come from the Golden Gate, there are the storms that come in and there is the quietness that one has, at least in the middle of the night, in a place like this. A city park like this is a place that is set aside for recreation: a patch of green, a few trees, a few flowering plants. That is a very diminished landscape. It lacks complexity, it lacks diversity, it lacks ability to continue the evolutionary processes on its own, as a self-organizing system. But the attraction of city parks, to so many millions of people, is that they are closer to the trees. And there is quite a large body of literature now, that suggests that people actually feel better when they are sitting under trees, rather than sitting in their apartments. That may be part of our own evolutionary past as a species, sitting under trees and looking out on a semi-open savannah. This is extremely important in these emerging theories of eco-psychology. It is important for the psychological health of human beings to have access, and to be in, even a very small patch of green in a city park. If that is all they can have access to. In your writings, you often refer to this concept of 'the ecological self'. The 'ecological self' is a intimate, personal, sensuous, erotic connection that we have with a specific place. So that we can say: 'I am a citizen, a dweller of - in my case - Humboldt Bay bioregion and the coastal mountains of Cascadia on the Pacific Rim.' It is our sense of playing with and being part of the mountains and rivers of our homeland. The ecological self means developing and cultivating a broader identification: beyond our family, our friends, to the non-human world, which includes sentient beings, plants and animals, and includes the mountains, rivers, the seashores, the deserts; that we are 'dwelling within'. Rediscovering our ecological self is important because a great deal of focus of modern civilization is on our human identities, our gender identities, our ethnic group identities, our nationalistic identities, our identities as members of corporations or as a military unit or as citizens of a city. The ecological self returns us to, what I would call, our primordial human experiences, as a primate in a natural landscape. The ecological crisis, in part, is a result of the way we have cut ourselves off from nature. We cut ourselves off by metaphorically killing nature. So that, in the words of the famous American utilitarian Gifford Pinchot, there is only people and natural resources. The view of the utilitarian resourcist is that all of nature is open for exploitation. If we do not have a sense of an ecological self, which includes our love of our place, then we treat the forest, the mountains, as commodity. You have come to know the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess quite well, the person who first coined the concept of 'deep ecology.' In the early 1970's, I was searching for a framework to provide a theoretical basis for my sociological investigations into the environmental movement and I found that Arne Naess' conceptualization of principles of shallow ecology and deep ecology was very relevant.  I met Arne Naess for the first time in the early eighties, at the Zen Center of Los Angeles. This was an appropriate setting for discussions with Arne, because I think his work has a kind of Buddhist overtone to it, there is almost a Zen to his own presentation and to the way he presents deep ecology. He plays with language. I think it is the gestalt that he has. In Buddhism there is a kind of gestalt. It is beyond the logic of the words that are being stated. It is inherently in the presentation, in the authenticity of the statements. When you meet Arne in person, there is a kind of playfulness, which I also see in a lot of Zen teachers. And he is playing with language, he is playing with words, he has this ability to engage in a kind of dance with deep ecology. Playing with the trees, with flowers, and with the ideas. There is a kind of serious lightness to his whole presentation, the way he presents his being. The way he makes tea for instance, which is also a very Zen approach. First thing in the morning, he makes a very strong pot of tea with one teabag and then takes from that pot all day long and adds hot water to it. That is the way he drinks tea, all day. Ever only using one teabag. In my very meagre understanding of Buddhism, there is no difference between action and being. The term 'engaged Buddhism' is redundant. Buddhism is engaged. In Zen practice, it is being engaged in the moment, being constantly engaged with our lives and our community. In the deep, long range ecology movement, community means a broader community with which we identify: the mountains and rivers and plants and animals. It is not detached at all. It is very much attached to the processes that are happening. The playfulness is an inherent part of that, an inherent part of value. How would you characterize the deep ecology movement? First of all: it is a social movement. It is not an ideology, it is not a specific church, it is not a specific religion, it is a social movement. 'Social' meaning: people working together in community. It is based upon ecology, the relationship between organisms and their habitat. It is 'long range', because it does not attempt to discount the future, but to take in account potentialities and possibilities of evolution of the system. And it is 'deep' in that it encourages participants to ask questions of why. Most importantly, why am I here? What is meaning? So I think we are, basically, as deep long range ecology movement, a search for meaning, in a world of fact. A humanist would perhaps argue that the essence of human beings is to distinguish themselves from nature, to evolve culture by separating from nature. The problem with humanism is its arrogance and its hubris. To say that humans are superior to nature, or separate from nature, is to deny - or to defy - the laws of ecology. Humans have crossed from the First World of nature into the Second World of culture, but to say that it is the destiny of humans to control something that is larger than ourselves, is to place humans as gods on this planet. The deep ecology movement sees humans as having very unique qualities, very special qualities. There is nothing in the movement that is anti-human, that denigrates humans, either as individuals, communities or species. The critique of modernism and of humanism in the deep ecology movement is that humanism has confused 'bigness' with 'greatness'. Humanists attempt to develop bigger societies, bigger technology, mega-technology and claim that with bigger technology humans are becoming greater. Greatness, in deep ecology, is cultivated through understanding of humility; humans are, in the words of ecologist Aldo Leopold, 'plain citizens' of natural systems, not lords and masters. Reform environmental movements have strategies that, in certain limited situations, are very effective and should be supported. The problem with the end-of-line thrust of reform environmentalism is that it is re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, while the ship heads towards an iceberg, without changing course. The evidence is that major changes are necessary in society in a very short period of time, or there will be very direct consequences for human populations. You have been a strong advocate of the establishment of designated wilderness areas, where human activities are severely restricted. Some people would argue that fifty percent of the total land and water areas of the Earth should be designated as wilderness areas to maintain the integrity of the wild processes, the integrity of breeding grounds for species that sciences have not yet identified. Endemic species need those types of habitats for their continued evolution, for their continued existence. You cannot have a species that is evolving without its habitat. A species in a zoo and in a artificial breeding program is not a species that is evolving. I think it was the Californian writer Nancy Newhall who said it best. In about 1960, she wrote a book called This is the American Earth, which she concluded by saying: 'Tenderly now let all men return to the Earth, wilderness has answers to questions we have not yet begun to ask.' One of the great forest ecologists here in America has advised us not to look at the trees in the forest, that we have. He says: 'We have greatly confused the forest with the trees. A forest is an expression of soil, of climate, of time and of place.' The gestalt of a forest is not in a tree or in a specific species of animal, it is an expression of a self-organizing system. It is a gestalt of place that is important in the deep ecology movement. Nature doesn't always have a friendly face. Earthquakes, floods and fires are also part of being related to a specific place. Many people have a romantic idea of nature, I would say, in the sense that they see nature as a scenery, that there is an aesthetic in nature. Now I would certainly agree that there is a very important sense of aesthetics in our relationship to nature. But nature is not just a collection of scenery that is preserved, based upon a cultural definition of nature. Nature is a process of interacting events. In North America, many theorists who look at a forest or a watershed, look at periodic events. Certain kinds of events tend to occur every decade or every fifty or hundred years. But these events are going to occur, earthquakes are going to occur. Here in San Francisco, recently, some of the geologists have estimated that a 1906 type of earthquake, hitting the San Francisco area, probably will occur once every 200, 250 years. Fire is a natural part of the landscape of California and it has helped to shape it. Different regions have had fire regimes of maybe once every ten years to maybe once every two hundred years, depending on the region. The new conservation movement has based itself on integrating human activities with free nature. 'Free nature' means: the play of nature without intensive human intervention. So throughout the western part of North America, we are now in a process of changing regulations concerning forest fires, to 'play with fire' in the forest. The health of the forest is partially dependent on the play of forest fires. So instead of fearing forest fires, or fighting forest fires always in a military way, we are beginning to recognize the importance of fire in the evolution of the landscape and to live with forest fires as part of our self. The practical implications of deep ecology are basically in every breath that we take. We are engaged in life processes. And the deep ecology movement is reclaiming authentic meaning in a world that has degraded authentic meaning in the search for, what I would consider, delusions. It seems to me, as a supporter of the deep ecology moment, that much of the problem of modernity has been to confuse creations of the human mind, particularly technology, social institutions, with the reality of nature. To me, deep ecology is based on an ontological realism. Without an ontological realism - that the system does exist, that we are part of the system, and that we are engaged with it - we are left with the postmodernist opinion that nature is just a construction of the human intellect and that all opinions are entirely subjective and relativistic and basically all equal to each other. In its extremest form, this leads to such statements as: 'There is no difference between Disneyland and an old-growth Redwood forest. It is all social construction of our perceptions of it.' The deep, long range ecology movement asserts that there is an ontological realism, that humans are part of the system and that we can rediscover our authentic existence in a world of fact. © Interview: Jan van Boeckel