Deep Ecology

"The existence and importance of the ecological self are easy to illustrate with some examples of what has happened in my own country, Norway. The scattered human habitation along the Arctic coast of Norway is uneconomic and unprofi table, from the point of view of the current economic policy of our welfare state. The welfare norms require that every family should have a connection by telephone (in case of illness). This costs a considerable amount of money. The same holds for mail and other services. Local fisheries are largely uneconomic perhaps because a foreign armada of big trawlers of immense capacity is fishing just outside the fjords. The availability of jobs was decreasing in the mid-1980s.

The government, therefore, heavily subsidized the resettlement of people from the Arctic wilderness, concentrating them in so-called centers of development, that is, small areas with a town at the center. But the people are clearly not the same when their bodies have been thus transported. Th e social, economic, and natural setting is now vastly diff erent. Th e objects with which people work and live are completely diff erent. Th ere is a consequent loss of personal identity. “Who am I?” they ask. Th eir self-respect, self-esteem, is impaired. What is adequate in the so-called periphery of the country is diff erent from what counts at the so-called centers.

If people are relocated or, rather, transplanted from a steep, mountainous place to a plain, they also realize, but too late, that their home-place has been part of themselves—that they have identifi ed with features of the place. And the way of life in the tiny locality, the density of social relations, has formed their persons.

Again, they are not the same as they were. Tragic cases can be seen in other parts of the Arctic. We all regret the fate of the Inuit, their difficulties in finding a new identity, a new social self, and a new, more comprehensive ecological self. The Lapps of Arctic Norway have been hurt by the diversion of a river for hydroelectricity. In court, accused of an illegal demonstration at the river, one Lapp said that the part of the river in question was “part of himself.” This kind of spontaneous answer is not uncommon among people. They have not heard about the philosophy of the wider and deeper self, but they talk spontaneously as if they had.

We may try to make the sentence “This place is part of myself ” more intellectually understandable by reformulations. For example, we might say, “My relation to this place is part of myself,” or “If this place is destroyed, something in me is destroyed,” or “My relation to this place is such that if the place is changed, I am changed.” ""