The Trumpeter - Journal of Ecosophy (Athabasca University)

Martin, Ralph

The Trumpeter c©
ISSN: 0832 6193
Vol. 16, No. 1 ( 2000)
The Application of Deep Ecology in Cuba
Ralph Martin
What can we learn about the application of deep ecology’s principles from the
Cuban experience? Cubans are so pre-occupied with making a living that they
seldom discuss ecology, however, when asked, most will say they support govern-
ment policies that are intended to avoid the destruction of their environment.
The lifestyle of Cubans certainly leaves a smaller ecological footprint than does
the lifestyle of people in western, industrialized nations, but it is often painful
to see that even official government policy to safeguard the environment is fre-
quently far down the line of priorities. However, much has been accomplished
in Cuba, and the potential for actualizing the principles of deep ecology may
begin with statements to elucidate the challenges and possibilities.
Cubans have a history of implementing new, alternative policies. Rural areas
are well-serviced, even mountainous areas without roads. Unfortunately, in re-
cent years, the country appears to be stagnating, and it is becoming increasingly
difficult to implement even small initiatives. There is almost no economic flexi-
bility. Because Cuba does not want to descend into the political and economic
chaos experienced by Eastern Europe in 1989, or by their Soviet mentors in the
1990s, the country has been inching through the “Special Period” since 1990 in
an attempt to avoid similar mistakes. Cubans are quite serious about their role
as the last bastion of genuine communism.
Some will argue that Cubans lived in a fool’s paradise for 30 years while the
Soviets supplied oil, grain and other products as an unreasonable economic
subsidy in exchange for sugar cane and a toehold in the American hemisphere.
They say Cuba never really had to manage its economy efficiently, and, without
the Soviets, its social and economic institutions are collapsing too. Others
are impressed that those institutions have survived the Soviet collapse and the
American embargo for so long. They see the Cubans as shrewd dealers in a tough
international political climate who appropriately took advantage of geopolitics
from 1960 to 1990. Since 1990, in a world economy not designed to coddle
socialists, Cuba has continued to maintain a society of accessible health care
and universal education.
Because Cubans inherited an inflexible economic system from the Soviets, they
have yet to effectively solve even relatively simple problems of production and
distribution with entrepreneurial incentives that would not represent capitula-
tion to capitalist dogma. For example, small farmers, with a stake in their land,
could be expected to produce a diversity of organic food crops, whereas the
large, state sugar-cane farms have difficulty responding to ecological impera-
tives. Large farms in North America are similarly aﬄicted. A preoccupation
with avoiding all forms of capitalism may be as much of a hindrance to the
The Application of Deep Ecology in Cuba 2
greening of a communist society as the addiction to capitalism is a hindrance to
the greening of Western society. One of the greatest challenges in the agrarian
culture of Cuba is that so few young people choose to apply their training and
intelligence to the noble profession of agriculture1. We have a similar problem
in North America. In Cuba, as in North America, our respective systems should
not preclude the engagement of our youth with the ecosystem for the sustain-
able production of food. We need their active, long-term commitment if the
fundamental problems of agriculture are to be addressed.
The Cuban government has survived numerous tough challenges since 1959,
especially since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990 and the Helms-Burton Act
extended the US economic embargo of Cuba to all companies dealing with the
US. Having lost their economic security blanket, the Cubans are justifiably
struggling to ensure access to basic goods and services, and, at the same time,
maintaining a vibrant social system. The Special Period was perhaps worst
in 1993 and 1994, but shortages continue and there is still an atmosphere of
insecurity. Although the education and health systems are remarkably capable
of providing good service under severe constraints, it is frustrating to meet so
many Cubans who are suffering because they can’t have access to common drugs
controlled by American pharmaceutical companies, subservient to the Helms-
Burton Act. There are many knowledgeable doctors, even in rural areas, but
their facilities are deteriorating and their supplies are shrinking. However, out
of the crisis, opportunities are becoming evident.
Cubans are now exploring acupuncture, homeopathy, naturopathy and other
options to sustain health. If they can’t always get access to drugs, they find
other ways. Some Cubans believe that their well-developed American-European
medical system must be recovered, but others are busy with alternatives.
Agriculture is in a similar situation to that of medicine. From the 1959 revolu-
tion until 1989, sugar was the main commodity (accounting for more than 75%
of all exports) that Cuba produced in exchange for Eastern bloc goods. Cuba
relied heavily on imports of wheat (100%), beans (90% – 99%), oil and lard (68%
– 94%), rice (50%), and milk and dairy products (38%) to feed their population,
resulting in a tenuous food security condition. Cuba depended on the Soviet
Union and Eastern Europe for imports of petroleum, chemicals, fertilizer, ma-
chinery and various components of animal feeds. With high inputs of imported
grain, the dairy industry had production levels of 15 to 20 litres of milk per cow
per day. High levels of fuel, fertilizer and chemicals were available to produce
other crops.2 Since the breakup of the Soviet Union in 1989, Cuban imports
declined precipitously. From 1989 to 1992, the decreases were: petroleum 53%,
fertilizer 77%, pesticides more than 62%, and animal feeds 70%.3 Dairy produc-
ers found they must shift to the use of local, renewable resources, and there are
other encouraging developments.
Organoponicos are urban gardens that utilize horse manure, leaves and biolog-
ical controls to produce fresh, organic vegetables. For example, in the city of
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The Application of Deep Ecology in Cuba 3
Cienfuegos, many horses are used to pull wagons as a means of transportation.
The manure is captured on canvass sheets attached to the harness and is later
composted with leaves and other organic matter from the area. The compost is
well mixed with soil in raised beds, located in abandoned urban areas or, often,
in former parking lots that are not required with less fuel available for cars. The
vegetables are watered in the dry season and pests are controlled with extracts
from the leaves of neem trees or with other biological controls. Most organo-
ponicos provide a living for three to four people, who sell their fresh, organic
produce on site. Some customers, not formerly familiar with organic food, are
now asking for organic produce and hoping to continue with it.4
I propose that there is a practical opportunity to develop the Platform Princi-
ples5 of the deep ecology movement in Cuba. The principles are listed below in
italics with a comment regarding the applicability of each to Cuba.
1. “The well-being and flourishing of human and non-human life on Earth
have value in themselves. These values are independent of the usefulness of the
non-human world for human purposes.”
Given that Cuba is an island nation which must ultimately rely on its own
resources, there is a sense that all parts of the island are valuable and part
of the coexistence of humans and non-humans. Cubans are as proud of their
surroundings as they are of their own human achievements, however, given the
aggressive American initiatives directed against them, they still have a pre-
carious sense of national security and may need to feel less threatened before
earth-values can become independent of the usefulness of the non-human world.
Landscapes would probably be sacrificed in defensive actions. Nevertheless, a
government committed to the principles of deep ecology might have consider-
able moral suasion within the UN, and attacks on protected ecosystems so close
to home, I suspect, would not be popular with the American public. Cubans
will respond to the support and appreciation of deep ecologists for the Cuban
project. They have been greening by necessity but, with support, can turn their
project to a model of social and environmental possibilities for a world addicted
to competition and consumption.
2. “Richness and diversity of life forms contribute to the realizations of these
values and are also values in themselves.”
In Cuba, there is not as much evidence to support this principle as I would
like to see, especially given that monocroping of sugar cane dominates the land-
scape. This is a major challenge that must be addressed. However, small farms
and reserved wilderness areas do have diverse life forms and they are valued.
The days of large Soviet enterprises are gone, and, as Cubans try to distance
themselves from this legacy, examples of more diverse agricultural systems and
natural systems are emerging. Current research by F. Funes at the Institute of
Research on Pastures and Forages, near Havana, is showing that small, diversi-
fied farms are not only more ecologically resilient but that they are also more
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The Application of Deep Ecology in Cuba 4
productive than monocropped farms.
The organoponicos, noted above, are diverse in both space (numerous species in
areas of less than one ha) and in time (several rotations in each bed per year),
in order to facilitate organic production.
3. “Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy
vital human needs.”
The challenge for Cubans is to meet vital needs without too much reliance on
extractive sugar-cane crops to provide cash to buy essential foods, such as beans
and milk. There is security in producing a predictable crop with well-established
societal and physical infrastructure in a capricious world market. Some Cubans
argue that they must sacrifice diversity to urgently meet current, vital, human
needs, but others recognize opportunities for promoting diversity, thereby en-
hancing the provision of those vital needs. New models of agro-ecological farms
and cooperatives are being built, organoponicos are increasing, and milk is be-
ing produced on farms with pastures and multiple-cropping systems. Perhaps
more wilderness areas will be set aside, even if they are seen as buffers to prevent
attack from abroad.
4. “The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial
decrease of human population. The flourishing of non-human life requires such
a decrease.”
There is currently a very responsible attitude regarding family planning in Cuba,
however, it is difficult for any government to publicly promote a program of pop-
ulation decrease. Also, because of an uneasiness about their aging population,
many would like to see the birth rate increased. The potential for an effective
population policy, and an effective response from Cubans, rests in their invest-
ment in education. Cuba has had a policy of educating all children and as
many women as men have benefited from higher education, a clear predictor of
decreasing population growth rates.
5. “Present human interference with the non-human world is excessive and the
situation is rapidly worsening.”
Cubans seem to micro-manage everything, probably as a result of the inse-
curity from a potential American attack and their legacy of long-term Soviet
influence. It is doubtful that they would accept non-interference with parts
of their land as a long-term, viable strategy. Furthermore, to gain foreign
exchange, tourism is being expanded at an alarming rate. Many sensitive
coastal areas are at risk. To establish havens from human interference, Cuba
needs international support and assurances of national security. Nevertheless,
Cubans have increased organic production in agriculture and are experiment-
ing with permaculture,¡ENDNOTENUMBER¿6¡ENDNOTENUMBER¿ a rela-
tively non-disruptive method of food production modelled on natural systems.
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The Application of Deep Ecology in Cuba 5
6. “Policies therefore must be changed. These policies affect basic economic,
technological and ideological structures. The resulting state of affairs will be
deeply different from the present.”
Policies are changing in Cuba, not only to prevent future instability, but to
continue to demonstrate that the revolution was an enduring historical develop-
ment that can adapt to progressive priorities. Demonstrating that the Cuban
government can adopt and implement policies seen as antithetical to US policy,
in itself, could be the driving force for policy change. Policy change could also
come as a result of more recognition that current achievements in biological
systems, initiated by necessity, have the potential to improve both human and
ecosystem well-being. Cuba has been a model for positive change in many de-
veloping countries and has an international reputation to uphold in this regard.
Cubans have adapted radically in the past and can do so again. They have a re-
markably civil society, free of excess violence, and with available health care and
education, in spite of their many political and economic challenges. The current
arguments about the excessive costs of health care and education in Canada and
the US ring hollow when compared to the priority given to these sectors in cash-
starved Cuba. Cubans have a societal and cultural imprint that could be the
essential ingredient to actually adopt and implement effective policies.
7. “The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling
in situations of inherent value) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher
standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the difference between
big and great.”
Cubans are very proud of their current high quality of life, achieved in spite of
much international opposition since 1959. The infant mortality rate is 9.5 per
1,000 live births, life expectancy is 75.7 years, and there are only 207 inhabitants
for each doctor.7 They rightly criticize excesses of consumption in capitalist so-
cieties and believe that they can continue to develop a community life of increas-
ing quality. Western societal values, as demonstrated by increasing numbers of
tourists, are a foil to the educational, health, cultural and sociological (strong
family support systems) achievements of Cubans that leave a relatively small
ecological footprint. Many young Cubans aspire to the bigness of an American
lifestyle, yet there is an inherent pride in their accomplishments of realizing
great values. This smouldering pride can be fanned into flames of action to
preserve these values by appreciation from allies of Cuba, and by recognizing
the disintegration of systems that are tenuously suspended by wasteful lifestyles
of bigness. Cubans of all ages respond very positively to assertions that many
North Americans will be coming to them for advice about sustainable technolo-
gies and strategies in the near future. Their hand has been forced sooner than
ours, and when we finally do face our “special period,” it may be much worse.
8. “Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation to try,
directly or indirectly, to implement the necessary changes.”
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The Application of Deep Ecology in Cuba 6
Deep Ecologists should consider Cuba because it is a society in which notable
social achievements have been accomplished within a short time and in spite
of monumental pressure. Cubans know how to live collectively, with impressive
personal security, even now, after so much economic hardship, and they are
knowledgeable in all areas of the sciences and arts. Cubans have three essential
ingredients that could help them to successfully adopt and implement ecological
principles: 1) because of isolation from much of the world market, they have the
necessity to live with few fossil fuels, pesticides, and other industrial inputs; 2)
they are well-educated about holistic science, ecosystems, and producing within
biological constraints; and 3) they have a collective memory of a recent historical
precedent for implementing progressive policies that resulted in a quantum leap
of life quality for most of the population.
There are also many reasons for the Cuban government not to adopt or imple-
ment deep ecology movement principles, but to succeed in our efforts as deep
ecologists, we have “an obligation to try, directly or indirectly, to implement the
necessary changes.” I would suggest that we do so wherever we recognize oppor-
tunities. Cuba has been a model of social change against a bleak background in
much of Latin America, and, perhaps, it could be the first developing nation to
struggle with the practical, political implementation of deep ecology principles.
They deserve our encouragement and assistance. If a small, anti-capitalist, is-
land nation like Cuba cannot find a place for environmental egalitarian values,
what does that say about the conditions for those values to take root at all?
Conclusion:
The Cuban Revolution was very much a human struggle to overthrow the op-
pression of many labourers and students. Despite current dissatisfaction, few
Cubans want to risk the erosion of the Triumph of the Revolution. If the deep
ecology movement principles can be perceived as enhancing the original objec-
tives of the revolution, and as contributing to an even further development of
humanity to the point where humans can choose to be as generous to their
environment as they have been to one another, then perhaps, with appropri-
ate assistance and measures to reduce threats to their security, even practical
Cubans will support them.
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The Application of Deep Ecology in Cuba 7
Endnotes
1. L. Garcia, Instituto Superior de Ciencias Agropecuarias de la Habana, pers.
comm.
2. R. Pratel Olite, University of Cienfuegos, pers. comm.
3. Rosset, P.M. and M. Benjamin, (eds.) 1993. The Greening of Cuba’s Agri-
culture. Ocean Press, Albourne, Australia.
4. A.R.Socorro Castro, University of Cienfuegos, pers. comm.
5. Drengson, Alan R. 1997. ”An Ecophilosophy Approach, the Deep Ecology
Movement and Diverse Ecosophies.” The Trumpeter 14(3): 110-111.
6. A.R.Socorro Castro, University of Cienfuegos, pers. comm.
7. Mendez Tovar, Carlos. 1997. Democracy in Cuba? Instituto Cubano del
Libro, Habana, Cuba. pp. 59-65.
Citation Format
Martin, Ralph (2000) The Application of Deep Ecology in Cuba. The Trumpeter: 16, 1.
http://www.icaap.org/iuicode?6.16.1.7
The Trumpeter


The Application of Deep Ecology in Cuba

Parton, Glenn

The Trumpeter (1998) 
ISSN: 0832 6193 
A Letter to Environmentalists about 
Friendship 
Glenn Parton  
What is missing from the environmental community is friendship. The great Roman 
orator Cicero said this about friendship: 
All I can do is to urge you to regard friendship as the greatest thing in the 
world; for there is nothing which so fits in with our nature, or is so exactly 
what we want in prosperity or adversity. 
Rather, the same scepticism and pessimism found in society at large also pervades the 
environmental community. Our love flows toward nature and little or none toward one 
another. There are at least two reasons for this. 
Many environmentalists have turned away from human beings; a reaction to our species' 
effect on the Earth and its inhabitants. However, the wedge between saving the Earth and 
saving human beings is often driven by a misanthropic impulse. The idea that only a 
catastrophic crash of human civilization can effect radical change ignores the potential of 
human beings to transcend themselves. 
Many of us have become hard-hearted as a result of intense fighting for ecological goals, 
creating a coldness within the environmental community. We wear a suit of armour to 
battle the voracious devourers of the Earth, and soon, because we are battling almost 
continually, we neglect to remove this suit of armour and it becomes, if not part of our 
character, at least comfortable or acceptable. This warrior-psychology, deeply ingrained 
in the movement and self-defeating, cuts us off from one another. 
Without friendship our work is too much like a job-something we do because we have to. 
We are left with the business model of working together, where productivity and 
efficiency come first. Newcomers are welcome to the extent that they help us carry out 
our agenda. Since few newcomers have the political, legal, and scientific skills to be 
major players within the environmental community, they often fall by the wayside. There 
is great compassion in the movement for animals, and rightly so, however, there is little 
time and energy for a person experiencing the loneliness of a divorce; living in fear of 
poverty; or dealing with the drudgery and humiliation found in some workplaces. In 
short, deep concern for one another is not a high priority within the environmental 
community. 
This is a big mistake as values alone-even important values, eco-values-are not strong 
enough to bind people. To build an effective environmental movement, we need the 
emotional bonds of friendship. Let our love for nature overflow to one another, creating a 
surplus of energy to complete the many tasks. We would be nourished by working 
together instead of worn down and burnt out. Without friendship, our dependence on 
more money and guilt to motivate us increases-insufficient factors for the long haul. 
An environmentalist's focus on Life provides an opportunity for true friendship within the 
environmental community-much greater, for example, than among individuals sharing a 
game of chess. The ecological crisis is the great opportunity for creating new social 
relations among intellectually awake people. Yet, we have neglected the great potential of 
friendship, not understanding that as few as four or five individuals who have attained 
true friendship, can be a powerful unit in their neighbourhood or locality. 
I think it is possible for the environmental community to reach a level of friendship 
without a struggle for consensus. I envision a communication deeper than words, a 
collective consciousness (a Noosphere, as Pierre Teilhard de Chardin called it). It is only 
out of such a field of consciousness that the guidance/wisdom will emerge for solving the 
ecological crisis. Unfortunately, nobody has The Answer. Rather than staking out value-
positions (regardless of how certain they may seem) and then defending them, we need to 
concentrate on friendship as the way to a more perfect vision. We cannot achieve 
agreement about ultimate values, or true vision, as a collection of atomized individuals or 
talking heads. True wisdom comes out of a community of individuals who know one 
another as complete human beings. 
Approximating the goal of friendship among ourselves would speak volumes for our 
cause. Beneath the massive indifference and hostility of modern society there is intense 
loneliness. By offering people the opportunity to belong to a genuine community in 
service to the Earth, we might have mass appeal. But first we must achieve it within our 
own ranks. 
Environmentalists need a better understanding of the deep motivational structure of the 
human being. The preservation of nature, by itself, will not become a mass movement, 
even though our very survival depends upon it. People are not motivated by a concern for 
survival alone, but there is a huge hunger within the general population for genuine 
community. Warm social relations amongst ourselves will draw many people. As they 
enter the circles of our friendship they will be led to the fire of nature that burns there, 
and they too, might become keepers of the fire. 
When environmentalists are gathered around the fire, but are still cold, what kind of 
message are we sending to those we would have join us? Our message must be that we 
protect and care for life in all its forms; human and nonhuman. The energy source of 
nature can generate a whole new society, but we must prove it first amongst ourselves. 
Isn't it time to recognize that the real environmental movement is a cultural revolution 
entailing new relations with nature and new social relations as well?! There is no better 
place to begin this Cultural Revolution than in our own ranks. 
We are wasting far too much energy in fighting politicians, bureaucrats and developers. 
Let us invest our energies in one another and form a community of friendship as the best 
strategy for empowering ourselves and influencing the consciousness of accessible 
people. This will help the movement qualitatively and quantitatively. Our rising river of 
life and love will flow into many political channels, but we must remain one movement. 
Most environmentalists agree that we need more friendship. But this has proved to be a 
very difficult thing to achieve, for the ego-structure of modern individualism is in all of 
us. This ego understands itself as separate from everything, and experiences the world 
defensively, with little or no tolerance for the smallest offence or indiscretion from 
others. We desperately need to achieve distance from this ego-structure in order to 
become aware of the harm we are doing to one another and our cause. Whoever is 
dedicated to preserving his or her separate ego at any cost is doing the environmental 
movement a serious disservice. We must learn to identify less with our own empirical ego 
and more with the environmental community as a whole. This requires that we rise above 
personal insult and injury; otherwise, resentment builds and it will eventually destroy the 
environmental movement. 
In traditional societies, friendships form naturally/spontaneously amongst people who 
share important values. But this is not happening within the environmental community 
despite our shared love of nature. What no longer occurs naturally must be consciously 
decided on and acted on, if we really want it. For this reason, what the environmental 
community needs is a spiritual practise of friendship. This is not something to be 
confined to an agenda, although it should probably have a place there. What I have in 
mind is something that we can begin, now, and continue as daily practice. 
It would be naive to treat everyone as a friend. However, let us attempt it among 
ourselves, again and again. Love of nature is proof that the human heart is at least 
partially open. The same life force, Eros, which attracts us to nature also attracts us to one 
another, if only we would obey the heart instead of the ego. Let go of the "tough guy" 
attitude, which is only a cover for the incredible hurt we feel for what is happening to the 
Earth and a cover for festering personal wounds that we received from other people, 
perhaps since childhood. 
I turn now to articulate some necessary components of a spiritual practice of friendship: I 
do not think it is possible to overestimate the importance of listening. We must discipline 
ourselves to listen attentively to one another, not advise or analyse one another. The 
person who masters the art of listening is a healer, with the power to draw out the truth in 
others. Each of us can go a long way in solving personal and planetary problems, if 
another is willing to witness our soul searching. When someone is going down deep to 
find answers, the good listener does not interrupt. We all have a lot of wisdom down 
deep, but we have forgotten, or almost forgotten, much of it. By listening to one another 
we will learn from one another, know one another deeply, and advance group awareness 
or community intelligence. Excessive preoccupation with one's own thoughts and 
feelings, instead of listening receptively to others, makes us deaf to one another. 
Another necessary component of the spiritual practice of friendship is respect for silence. 
If truth is an iceberg, then silence represents that portion of the truth that is underwater. 
Unless we respect silence, we will know only partial and surface truth. Periods of silence 
are usually ignored or filled up with words as soon as possible. Often, discussions reach 
an impasse, and the silence, which ensues, is a necessary part of new insight that is trying 
to emerge. Unfortunately this silence is not valued, and so it is not sustained. The 
Quakers have a spiritual exercise that consists of individuals sitting together in silence as 
a path to consensus. So little is silence valued among ourselves that as soon as someone 
falls into silence, perhaps to gather his or her thoughts, it is regarded as an opportunity to 
interrupt him or her. We must respect silence between us because it provides the time and 
space for truth to emerge. The greater truth is sometimes there in that which is not said. 
Intimate talk is also a necessary component of the spiritual practice of friendship. It is 
better to say something insignificant, stupid, and even hostile than to hold back from 
saying what you feel like saying, or to disguise your true feelings. It matters a great deal 
that we are honest and sincere with one another. Speak from the heart, and the truth will 
eventually show itself. The Native American tradition of the "talking stick" would serve 
us well in this regard. It may well be that it is only through a full disclosure of the 
personal self that we can reach the true self. By pouring out one's personal self, emptying 
it, we can break through to a broader identity. How many people are packing around 
thoughts and feelings that they have never had the opportunity to share with anyone! 
Intimate talk can break the isolation of modern individualism and lead to the awareness 
that we are all essentially one. 
The spiritual practice of friendship requires reaching out to one another. Do not always 
wait for others to come to you. Initiate contact. We must stop playing this game: "If you 
recognize me, then I will recognize you." Sometimes a simple nod or smile is enough; 
other times something more is needed. Ask questions, invite others to meetings, events, 
restaurants, and into your home. Overcome the fear of rejection! 
Absorb personal blows from fellow environmentalists in a spirit of cooperation toward 
higher consciousness. That is how we communicate deeply with one another. To absorb a 
personal insult from another is to say, in effect, to this other: "I know it is not the real you 
that strikes me now." We thus act as a mirror for the other. What does it prove that you 
were wrongly injured, except that the other is not yet your friend! Let us raise the bar of 
verbal and nonverbal dialogue above competing and combating egos. 
Take each friendship as far as it will go at its own pace, but when it is strained, then back 
down to the previous level of compatibility or harmony. True friendship is always 
reciprocal, and we get into trouble when one person's needs and expectations get ahead of 
another's. When this happens, back off the relationship just enough to reset it in the right 
direction. Sometimes relationships get thin, and it is even necessary to start all over again. 
Develop a full spectrum of friendships across wide differences. 
Keep the faith, or trust in one another. It only appears that a relationship has come down 
to nothing. Our shared love of nature still exists, and it will push up through the barren 
ground of our cultural conditioning and blossom in eco-friendship, if we patiently grow 
it. As Emerson said: 
Let us approach our friend with an audacious trust in the truth of his heart, 
in the breadth, impossible to be overturned, of his foundations. 
When friendship fails, the ego-defensive move is to blame others. Ask yourself this 
question: Where did I go wrong to cause the relationship to arrive at this tragic point? 
Since it is almost always the case that each party in a dispute is to blame, at least to some 
degree, it is possible to set aside the issue of right and wrong altogether and focus on 
one's own failure. What might I have done differently to have made a friend? Assume that 
no environmentalist does intentional harm to another environmentalist. Either she or he is 
unaware of the offence, or is reacting, fighting back, to some perceived insult or injury. 
Use instances of rejection and hurt to look more deeply into the relationship. In doing so 
we purify ourselves for friendship and become more transparent to one another. 
Without generosity there is no friendship. This does not necessarily mean having 
everything in common, but we all possess some gifts (time, energy, money, and 
opportunity) that we can bestow on one another. Friendship involves the free flow of gifts 
without concern for balancing the scales. No one has the right to demand or expect 
generosity from another. Demand and expect generosity from yourself. Let each person 
set the standard of his or her own gift giving. Ideally, we cannot have a genuine 
community of those who have too much wealth and those who have too little wealth. 
Environmentalists are understandably sad, but we cannot afford to sink into depression 
and defeatism. Friendship is an antidote to despair because it revitalizes us. Each person 
who loves nature is a treasure to be explored; an occasion for cheerfulness. Of course we 
cannot forget the crises we face, which is all the more reason for celebrating the hope we 
find in one another. The art of friendship is about finding the positive in one another and 
sharing companionship. 
The spiritual practice of friendship is, in my view, the social interaction that reaches 
beneath the chit-chat and humdrum of everyday life. It is a deeper communication, the 
opening of our inner places to one another. Living in our secret worlds causes our 
feelings of isolation and loneliness; our fear of exposing ourselves to strangers. Of course 
there is risk; there is safety in the privacy of these inner places. Here, one is untouchable. 
The problem is that these inner places contain the best and worst aspects of ourselves; 
everything is jumbled together and it is impossible to sort it out on our own. We need to 
heal one another. There is no real friendship without communication between our inner 
places, where the crucial decisions of life are made. We must stop writing off one another 
when we fail at genuine human contact, and stop storing these negative experiences in 
inaccessible inner places. The mysterious union of friendship will transform us and make 
us whole. In the words of the sixteenth century Frenchman Montaigne:
In the friendship I speak of, our souls mingle and blend with each other so 
completely that they efface the seam that joined them, and cannot find it 
again. 
In sum, the environmental movement troubled because of mounting personality conflicts. 
We cannot get along well enough with one another to do what needs to be done. We do 
not need more facts, arguments, and ideas, but more friendship. The binding force of 
friendship can build the environmental movement, serving both to energize us and to 
draw in accessible people. Perhaps even stonehearted individuals will not be unaffected 
by our rising family of friendship. Although this is what needs to happen, it will be very 
difficult to accomplish because the selfishness, greed, competition, and paranoia endemic 
to modern society also exist inside the environmental community. 
For this reason we need a spiritual practice of friendship, a discipline according to 
definite rules that bring out, manifest, the true self. The working premise is that we are all 
one, despite our differences: waves on the ocean. If this ocean is striving to become 
conscious of itself, then friendship is the instrument that will enable it to do so. 
Friendship is the way. 
Some rules for a spiritual practice of friendship are: 
1. Listen attentively 
1. Respect silence 
1. Speak intimately 
1. Reach out 
1. Absorb the blows 
1. Back down 
1. Keep the faith 
1. Assume the blame 
1. Give generously 
1. Enjoy one another 
Copyright retained by author(s)  
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A Letter to Environmentalists about Friendship

Maser, Chris

The Trumpeter (1998) 
ISSN: 0832 6193 
True Community is Founded on a Sense of 
Place, History and Trust 
Chris Maser  
Community, as English historian Arnold Toynbee said of civilization, "is a movement 
and not a condition, a voyage and not a harbor." But "community" is a deliberately 
different word than "civilization" or even "society." Although "community" may refer to 
neighbourhoods or workplaces, to be meaningful it must imply membership in a human-
scale collective, where people encounter one another face to face. 
Community is thus a group of people with similar interests living under and exerting 
some influence over the same government in a shared locality. Because they have a 
common attachment to their place of residence, where they have some degree of local 
autonomy, they form the resident community. 
People in such a community share social interactions with one another and organizations 
independently of government, and through such participation, are able to satisfy the full 
range of their daily requirements within the local area. The community also interacts with 
the larger society, both in creating change and in reacting to it. Finally, the community as 
a whole interacts with the local environment, moulding the landscape within which it 
rests and is in turn moulded by it. In this sense, community is about the oneness of the 
whole and the wholeness of the one. 
Community is rooted in a sense of place through which the people are in a reciprocal 
relationship with their landscape. As such, a community is not simply a static place 
within a static landscape, but rather is a lively, ever-changing, interactive, interdependent 
system of relationships. Because a community is a self-organizing system, it does not 
simply incorporate information, but changes its environment as well. Thus, as the 
community, in its living, alters the landscape, so the landscape, in reaction, alters the 
community. 
Reciprocity is the self-reinforcing feedback loop that either extends sustainability to or 
withholds it from a community and its landscape. We, therefore, create trouble for 
ourselves in a community when we confuse order with control. Although freedom and 
order are partners in generating a viable, well-ordered, autonomous community, a 
community is, nevertheless, an open system that uses continual change to avoid 
deterioration. 
A community also has a history, which must be passed from one generation to the next, if 
the community is to know itself throughout the passage of time. History is a reflection of 
how we see ourselves and thus goes to the very root by which we give value to things. 
Our vision of the past is shaped by, and in turn shapes, our understanding of the present - 
those complex and comprehensive images we carry in our heads and by which we decide 
what is true or false. 
*This article is adapted from Setting the Stage for Sustainability: 
A Citizens Handbook by Chris Maser, Russ Beaton, and Kevin 
Smith. 1998. Lewis Publishers, Boca Raton, FL.  
When the continuity of a community's history is disrupted, the community suffers an 
extinction of identity and begins to view its landscape not as an inseparable extension of 
itself, but as a separate commodity to be exploited for immediate financial gain. When 
this happens, community is destroyed from within, because trust is withdrawn in the face 
of growing economic competition. 
It seems clear, therefore, that true community literally cannot extend itself beyond local 
place and history. "Community," says Wendell Berry, "is an idea that can extend itself 
beyond the local, but it only does so metaphorically. The idea of a national or global 
community is meaningless apart from the realization of local communities." 
For a true community to be founded in the first place and to be healthy and sustainable, it 
must rest on the bedrock of mutual trust among its members, as eloquently penned by 
Wendell Berry: 
...a community does not come together by covenant, by a conscientious 
granting of trust. It exists by proximity, by neighborhood; it knows face to 
face, and it trusts as it knows. It learns, in the course of time and 
experience, what and who can be trusted. It knows that some of its 
members are untrustworthy, and it can be tolerant, because to know in this 
matter is to be safe. A community member can be trusted to be 
untrustworthy and so can be included. But if a community withholds trust, 
it withholds membership. If it cannot trust, it cannot exist. 1  
"Trust," according to the American Heritage Dictionary, "is firm reliance on the integrity, 
ability, or character of a person or thing; confident belief; faith." But trust cannot really 
be defined, because it is based on faith that a particular person is "trustworthy" or faithful 
to his or her word. Trust can only be lived in one's motives, thoughts, attitude, and 
behaviour. 
Trust versus mistrust is the psychosocial crisis in the first of Erik Erikson's eight stages of 
human development. Trust versus mistrust is the dominant struggle from ages zero to 
one. Erikson assigned hope as the virtue of this stage in which the mother-baby relation 
lays the foundation for trust in others and in oneself. But as everything has within itself 
the seed of its opposite, this stage also presents the challenge of mistrust in others and a 
lack of confidence in oneself. 
Hope, as the virtue of trust, is the enduring belief that one can achieve one's necessities 
and wants. Trust in human relationships is thus the bedrock of community and its 
sustainable development. 
If trust is not developed, none of Erikson's other stages of development can take place: 
autonomy versus shame and doubt, initiative versus guilt, industry versus inferiority, 
identity versus identity confusion, intimacy (relationship) versus isolation, generativity 
versus stagnation, and integrity versus despair - all of which are part and parcel of 
community sustainability. Community is, therefore, the melding of how people in 
different developmental stages relate to both themselves as individuals within a 
community and with others as a community. 
In sum, community is relationship, and meaningful relationship is the foundation of a 
healthy, sustainable community. In this connection, Ralph Waldo Emerson felt that, "It is 
one of the most beautiful compensations of this life that no man can sincerely try to help 
another without helping himself." William James said it thusly: "Wherever your are, it is 
your own friends who make your world." 
Community also reminds one that the scale of effective organization and action has 
always been that of small local groups. As anthropologist Margaret Mead says: "Never 
doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed 
it is the only thing that ever has." 
It is, therefore, logical that community not only is a way of valuing the independent 
voluntary or nonprofit organization but also relies for its expression on such institutions 
as neighbourhood schools, family centers, and volunteer organizations. Further, creating 
sustainable communities strengthens one's fidelity to a sense of place and is the best 
possible immigration policy, because it raises the value of staying home. These things 
top-down government cannot fulfil. 
With the current disintegration of family and local community in American life, it is 
unlikely that most people in this country really have an intimate sense of trust and 
belonging. We have largely lost our sense of connection to community that once 
impressed the French political figure and traveler Alexis de Tocqueville to the point 
where he wrote in the 1830s: "Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions 
constantly form associations...religious, moral, serious, futile, general or restricted, 
enormous or diminutive. The Americans make associations to give entertainments, to 
found seminaries, to build inns, to construct churches, to diffuse books, to send 
missionaries to the antipodes; in this manner they found hospitals, prisons and schools." 2  
He went on to argue that is was no accident that "the most democratic country on the face 
of the earth is that in which men have, in our time, carried to the highest perfection the art 
of pursuing in common the object of their common desire." Why then the progressive 
disintegration of trust? 
Consider that in 1966 only thirty per cent of the people surveyed said they did not trust 
the government in Washington, D.C., some of the time or all of the time, and in l992 
seventy-five per cent of the people surveyed responded in the negative. What has 
happened to the most democratic country on Earth? Why have we lost our sense of trust, 
our sense of community? There are at least three possibilities. 
One reason for this loss may be our lopsided expansionist economic world view in which 
material possessions and the incessant push for continual economic growth take the place 
of spirituality, as once manifested in quality relationships and mutual caring. The 
economic world view translates into both adults having to work at paying jobs outside the 
home in many households just to make ends meet, which raises the question, "Who is left 
at home to act as a parent and forge community ties, when both adults are too busy?" If, 
however, human society and its environment are ever to become sustainable, it is 
necessary to rediscover or recreate our sense of local community in order to balance the 
material with the spiritual, the piece within the whole. 
The second reason is summed up by Abraham Maslow: "We [as human beings] fear our 
highest possibilities (as well as our lowest ones). We are generally afraid to become that 
which we can glimpse in our most perfect moments, under the most perfect conditions, 
under conditions of greatest courage. We enjoy and even thrill to the god-like possibilities 
we see in ourselves in such peak moments. And yet we simultaneously shiver with 
weakness, awe, and fear before these same possibilities." Is it, as Maslow says, our fear 
of our own greatness and success that is the inner enemy made manifest in the moral 
decay that is consuming communities in this country? 
The third reason may be that we have lost sight of the meaning of community itself as we 
enter an era of naked competition in the global market place. Here, it is instructive to 
consider communities of birds in a given area as ornithologists think of them. First, there 
is the resident community, which is that group of birds inhabiting the area to which they 
have a strong sense of fidelity all year. In order to stay throughout the year, year after 
year, they must be able to meet all of their ongoing requirements for food, shelter, water 
and space. These requirements become most acutely focused during the time of nesting, 
when young are reared, and during harsh winter weather. 
Then there are the summer visitors, who overwinter in the southern latitudes and fly north 
to rear their young. They arrive in time to build their nests, and in so doing must fit in 
with the yearlong residents without competing severely for food, shelter, water, or space, 
especially space for nesting. If competition were too severe, the resident community 
would decline and perhaps perish through overexploitation of the habitat by summer 
visitors, which have no lasting commitment to a particular habitat. 
There are also winter visitors, who spend the summer in northern latitudes, where they 
rear their young, and fly south in the autumn to overwinter in the same area as the 
yearlong residents, after the summer visitors leave. They too must fit in with the yearlong 
residents without severely competing with them for food, water, shelter, and space during 
times of harsh weather and periodic scarcities of food. Here, too, the resident community 
would decline and perhaps perish, if overexploitation of the habitat through competition 
were too severe. And like the summer visitors, the winter visitors are not committed to a 
particular habitat but use the best of two different habitats (summer and winter). 
On top of all this are the migrants, which come through in spring and autumn on their 
way to and from their summer nesting grounds and winter feeding grounds. They pause 
just long enough to rest and replenish their dwindling reserves of body fat by using local 
resources of food, water, shelter and space to which they have only a passing fidelity 
necessary to sustain them on their long journey. 
The crux of the issue is the carrying capacity of the habitat for the yearlong resident 
community. If the resources of food, water, shelter and space are sufficient to 
accommodate the yearlong resident community as well as the seasonal visitors and 
migrants, then all is well. If not, then each bird in addition to the yearlong residents in 
effect causes the area of land and its resources to shrink per resident bird. This, in turn, 
stimulates competition, which under circumstances of plenty would not exist. If, 
however, such competition causes the habitat to be overused and decline in quality, the 
ones who suffer the most are the yearlong residents for whom the habitat is their sole 
means of livelihood. 
Here, I might anticipate your question concerning what a resident bird community has to 
do with a resident human community. It has to do with Wendell Berry's notion that a true 
community can extend itself beyond the local, but only if it does so metaphorically. This 
means that, if the resident community is rendered nonsustainable by outside influences - 
as through clearcutting a forest by a large absentee corporation to the detriment of a local 
water catchment - then the trust embodied in the continuity of a community's history is 
shattered, as is the self-reinforcing feedback loop of mutual well-being between the land 
and the people over time. 
Another more subtle way outside influence can destroy community is transients in its 
population. In one small town in Idaho, where I asked people how they felt about the 
fairly large number of employees of the U.S. Forest Service living in their community, 
they replied that they tried not to get to know them. 
When asked if they avoided getting to know the folks from the Forest Service, because 
they were transients who felt no sense of place within the community, the answer was 
only partly in the affirmative. They said it was just too painful to become friends with 
Forest Service employees and to learn to trust them, only to have them leave in two or 
three years. That kind of continual loss was too much like perpetual grieving for the death 
of friends and was more than the community could abide. 
When a community loses (for whatever reason) the cohesive glue of trust embedded in its 
fundamental values, it loses its identity and is set adrift on the ever-increasing sea of 
visionless competition both within and without, where "grow or die" becomes the 
economic motto driving the cultural system. Such visionless competition inevitably rings 
the death knell of community. 
We must remember that we are, first and foremost, creatures who need to share in order 
to know that we exist and have value, for it is through sharing our life's experiences on a 
day-to-day basis that we define our personal identities. If, therefore, in the hurry-worry of 
today's materialistic world we lose sight of our need for one another as human beings, we 
will find in the end that we have nothing of real value after all, regardless of how much 
material wealth we have gained through our frantic activities garnered unto ourselves. 
Endnotes 
1. Wendell Berry, Sex, Economy, Freedom and Community. (New York: Pantheon 
Books, 1993). 
2. Joanne Jacobs, "American's civic involvement still strong, but changing," Corvallis 
Gazette-Times (Corvallis, OR, July 25, 1966). 
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True Community is Founded on a Sense of Place, History and Trust

Anker, Peder

 
 
 
 
 
 
The Trumpeter (1998)  
ISSN: 0832 6193 
 
 
On Ultimate Norms in Ecosophy T 
Peder Anker1
 
 
This essay does two things. It offers one possible interpretation of Arne Næss's ultimate ecosophic norms, and 
it shows how these norms can support the following three statements in the deep ecological platform (dep.): 
 
(dep. 1): The flourishing of human and non-human life on Earth has intrinsic value. The 
value of non-human life forms is independent of the usefulness these may have for 
narrow human purposes. 
(dep. 2): Richness and diversity of life forms are values in themselves and contribute to 
the flourishing of human and non-human life on Earth. 
(dep. 3): Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital 
needs.2
 
I shall trace deep ecological argumentation from Næss's ultimate premises to these platform principles. I will 
move stepwise down his normative hierarchy, which is conceived on analogy to a hypothetical-deductive 
system.3 This is not a strict formal logical system, but a "practical" derivative argumentation. 
 
Ecosophy T:4 The Bergson-Spinoza Connection 
 
Inspiration for Ecosophy T has been drawn from a number of sources, most importantly Benedict de Spinoza 
and Mahatma Gandhi.5
 However, few readers of the literature of deep ecology have seen clearly how Næss uses Henri Bergson in his 
reading of Spinoza. In this presentation, I shall take Bergson's summary of Spinoza as a point of departure to 
Næss's philosophy. This scheme is in line with Næss's insistence that Ecosophy T could be read in the light of 
Bergson: "[...] together with Spinoza he [Bergson] is one of the most important harbingers of the deep ecology 
movement I am working on."  Bergson views Spinoza's basic intuition as follows: 6
 
[...] it is the feeling of a coincidence between the act by which our mind knows truth 
perfectly, and the operation by which God engenders it. [...] when man, sprung from 
divinity, succeeds in returning to it, he perceives that what he had at first taken to be 
two opposed movements of coming and going are in fact a single movement.7
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
By the phrase "a single movement," Bergson is alluding to Spinoza's holism. At once a whole and a multitude 
of parts, created nature (natura naturata), may be understood as the effect of an internal causal unity in this 
whole; that is, as creative nature (natura naturans).8 Thus, "Whatsoever is, is in God, and without God nothing 
can be, or be conceived."9 This is to say that every human being, like every other being, ontologically speaking, 
"is in God" or Nature (with a capital N), and "... emanates from the Deity." In Ecosophy T, therefore, the 
human purpose is to reach an adequate understanding of his or her being-in-Nature, an understanding that may 
be seen, as Bergson writes, as an epistemological re-entry into creative nature. This is achieved through the 
understanding of concrete particular beings as expressions of the Deity. Spinoza assumes that Nature is the 
immanent cause of itself and of all other things, and that, as a result without limits. Nature (with capital N) must 
be completely present in all its effects (or it would be divisible) and as much present in the parts as in the 
whole. It follows that particular things differ only in the modal sense. Thus Spinoza can write: "The more we 
understand particular things, the more we understand God."10 Humans are able to understand themselves as 
striving sub specie aeternitatis.11 From this point of view, what human beings first and foremost achieve is an 
understanding of their own striving to persist in being, not within abstract and quantified time, but as a kind of 
(Bergsonian) duration within eternity.12 Linking Spinoza to Bergson's distinction between duration (la durée) 
and abstract time (temps), Naess, in Ecosophy T, develops this concept further: 
 
Ecosophy T concentrates especially upon the aspect of general unfolding in suo esse. 
For life in general it implies the "creative evolution" (Bergson), the steady extension 
of the biosphere, from the comfortable, lukewarm, shallow seas to arctic oceans and 
steaming hotwater springs.13
 
Næss appears to interpret this creative evolution of particular beings—indeed of all nature through the striving 
to persist in its being—as an expression of the ultimate norm of Ecosophy. 
 
 
(N1): "Self-realization!"14 
 
According to Spinoza, the power each particular being has to struggle for self-preservation is an expression of 
the power of God in his active aspect,15 so that those who realize themselves can be said to be living the life of 
God. Næss links this with Gandhi's concept of self-realization and the distinction between a "little self" (with a 
lower-case ’s’) and "the big Self" (with a capital ’S’).16 The Self (or Nature) is absolutely infinite and, by 
necessity, finds expression in all finite beings. Every act of (self-)expression is constitutive of the particular 
being's striving for better self-perseverance. Spinoza assumes this to be a necessity, hence Bergson's notion of 
an action whereby God brings about a non-arbitrary realization. It is the human condition to participate fully in 
the realization of the Self. Hence, the norm to "Seek complete self-realization!," that is, to seek an 
understanding of the being from which one proceeds, Nature. The Norm (N1) applies to all finite rational 
beings, and not to Nature in itself. Nor does one need such norms, if one has achieved adequate understanding; 
the norms are simply intended as crutches for the liberation strategies for constrained humans.17 The ultimate 
aim of these strategies is a complete self-realization.18
 
The two related concepts of "Self" and "self," representing Nature and the individual respectively, are 
fundamental to the understanding of the dual usage of the term "self-realization." Næss presumes, on the one 
hand, an all-inclusive Self, or Nature; on the other hand, the concept a person of inadequate self-insight would 
form of himself as an isolated or social ego.19
 
There are a number of varieties of this ego-concept. Some are extremely inadequate and concentrate one-
dimensionally on what it means to be human. Others set up a model of free humans as a goal of self-realization 
 
 
 
 
 
 
to be earnestly pursued.20 In addition to this passive striving for liberation, there is the active striving of the 
free.21 The difference between pleasure and joy is tied to these two types of freedom.22 Adequate self-
understanding is that through which one realizes oneself as a part of the whole, all-encompassing Self, which 
does not exist separated from particular beings. Though inspired by Gandhi and not Spinoza, this Self-
understanding is paralleled in Spinoza's writings on thinking as part of the infinite intellect.23
 
At least two important questions can be raised in connection with the injunction to seek complete self-
realization. First, what does it mean to seek or strive? Second, what is the identity of the inadequate and the 
actualized Self-realizing humans, respectively? 
 
Human struggle for Self-realization may be adequate or inadequate, a situation characterized by constrained 
passivity or free activity respectively. The aim is to find a strategy of liberation from a constrained and passive 
to a free and active level of being. This is the basic idea in Bergson's reading of Spinoza's intuition as two 
opposing movements (the free and the constrained) that unites in one. 
  
Inadequate self-realization is to be understood as constrained realization to the extent that one does not 
recognize being part of a free non-arbitrary Nature. Only a person of inadequate self-understanding will assume 
that he or she is in possession of a free will unconstrained by Nature. An atomistic view of human beings as 
separated from the gestalt of wills in the life-world does, from an ecosophic point of view, entail an inadequate 
and constrained view of the human condition. People with such inadequate self understanding would need 
ecosophic norms as a moral guide in practical life. 
 
An adequate understanding of one's own struggle involves that one understand oneself as an expression of the 
infinite powers of Nature's creation. Through a completely adequate recognition and realization of (N1), 
humans come to understand that their struggle follows by necessity from the struggle of Nature, and that it has 
an inner link with other parts of the environment through a common inner cause, Nature. This is an amoral 
element in Spinoza that goes beyond his concern with "good" and "bad" values.24
 
In the final analysis, Ecosophy T too is amoral in the sense that one recognizes one's non-accidental necessity 
as being above any norm. As being-in-Nature, or in the Self, through an adequate understanding, one is raised 
even above one's own normative system. This does not mean that one understands one's own struggle as part of 
Nature as a whole. The relation between Nature and the particular parts is not a relation between part and 
whole, but one between unity and plurality. Those who can see their own striving in this way, will see 
themselves as parts of creative nature and in the light of the inner unity that brings about creative nature as a 
non-separately existing whole and as a plurality of parts.25
 
Between the "adequate" and "inadequate" poles, people strive to put aside private (constrained) self-realization 
and recognize their being-in-the-Self.26 What consequences does this have for the identity of the individual? 
Ecosophic self-realization is a recognition of biospheric interdependence in the Self. Everything is connected in 
an eco-social unity. The individual is part of coexistence with Nature, a coexistence that is for the best of all 
concerned.27 Individuals realize themselves through identification with the extended Self or Nature. Self-
realization is achieved through identification and symbolic coexistence with Nature. The sense of taking part in 
a greater context is basic to the individual's self-respect and self-esteem. If this greater context is destroyed, "[..] 
nothing appears to remain [of the self]."28 This does not, however, imply that self-realization is bound up with 
particular groups. Inadequate self-recognition as an isolated ego independent of the deeper eco-social unity is a 
misconceived and "shallow" self-recognition, as opposed to a "deep," adequate understanding of the self within 
the biosphere.29 An increase in recognition of biospheric togetherness is according to the ecosophy pleasurable, 
while a private ego-realization is tragic and full of sorrows.30 Which is not to say that private ego-realization is 
perceived as misery; the individual in question may well experience happiness, but this happiness is passive and 
not active. These passive joys are like "the pleasures of slaves under the tyranny of passions."31 
 
 
 
 
 
 
                                                          
 
Endotes 
1. I am indebted to Arne Næss for extensive comments and academic generosity, and to an anonymous reviewer of 
this journal. In the summer of 1997 I enjoyed a friendly exchange of views with Næss which resulted in an article by 
me and a most arresting reply by him, forthcoming as Peder Anker, "From Skepticism to Dogmatism and Back: 
Remarks on the History of Deep Ecology," Philosophical Dialogs: Arne Næss and the Progress of Ecophilosophy, 
Andrew Brennan and Nina Witoszek (eds.), (Boston: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999). This article about ultimate 
norms in his ecosophy represents my reply to his comment, and the readers of the Trumpeter may enjoy reading it in 
that context. Also notice that this essay represents one of several possible interpretations of Næss's Ecosophy T. For 
this methodological approach see Arne Naess, Interpretation and Preciseness, (Oslo: Dybwad, 1953). 
 
2. Arne Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, David Rothenberg (trans. and ed.), (Cambridge: Cambridge 
University Press, 1989), p. 29, and Arne Naess,  Ekspertenes syn på naturens egenverdi ("The experts' view of the 
intrinsic value of nature"), (Oslo: Tapir Forlag, 1987), p.11. 
 
3 Arne Naess, "Deep Ecology and Ultimate Premises", The Ecologist, Vol. 18 Nos. 4/5, 1988, p.131. Bill Devall Bill 
and George Sessions, Deep Ecology, (Salt Lale City: Gibbs M. Smith Inc., 1985), p. 226. See also Arne Naess, "A 
Systematization of Gandhian Ethics of conflict resolution", Conflict Resolution, Vol.2 no.2, June 1958, p.141.
 
4. T - as in the initial of Næss's 'Tvergastein' cabin located in the Norwegian mountains. The esoteric reference to 
Tvergastein illustrates the concrete 'rootedness' of Næss ecosophic work in his own life. T can also be understood as 
short for tolkning - the Norwegian word for 'interpretation'. See Næss's Interpretation and Preciseness,1953. 
 
5. Arne Naess, Freedom, Emotion and Self-Subsistence: The Structure of a Central Part of Spinoza=a Ethics, (Oslo: 
Universitetsforlaget, 1975). On Gandhi, see Naess, Conflict Resolution, 1958. Arne Naess, Gandhi og atomalderen 
("Gandhi and the Atomic Age"), (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget, 1960), p. 28f. Johan Galtung and Arne Naess, Gandhis 
politiske etikk ("Gandhi's political ethics"), (Oslo: Tannum, 1955), 2nd edition (Oslo: Pax Forlag, 1968, chapt.3. For 
reasons of space, I shall place less emphasis on Gandhi.
 
6 Arne Naess, "Det handler om planetens overlevelse" ("It is a matter of the survival of this planet"), interview in 
Klassekampen, 05.09.92, (my trans.). Næss refers directly to Bergson on two central points: self-realization and 
creative development (Naess, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, 1989, p. 85, 166). Though Spinoza remains Næss's 
main source of inspiration, Bergson's readings of Spinoza provide a suitable point of departure for an interpretation 
of Ecosophy T. Indeed, in his own education Næss learned to appreciate Bergson (in early 1931) long before he 
engaged with the writings of Spinoza and Gandhi.
 
7 Henri Bergson, "Philosophical Intuition," The Creative Mind, (New York: Citadel Press, 1992), p. 113.
 
8 Spinoza, E 1P29Sch. E=Ethicia, P=Propositio, Sch=Scholium, Dem=Demonstratio, Pr=Praetatio, Cor=Corollarium, 
Aff=Affectuum, D=Definitiones. All quotations from Baruch de Spinoza, Works of Spinoza, Vol. I-II, Elwes, R.H.M. 
(trans.), (New York: Dover Publications, 1955).
 
9 Ibid. E1P15.
 
10 Ibid. E5P24.
 
11 Ibid. E5P29Dem.
 
12 Ibid. E3P6-7, E3P45Sch, E5P29Sch.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
                                                                                                                                                                                            
13 Næss, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, 1989, p.166.
 
14 Arne Naess, Økologi, samfunn og livsstil ("Ecology, Society and Lifestyle"), 5th edition, (Oslo: 
Universitetsforlaget, 1976). (New identical edition 1992), p. 312; Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, p.197. As far as 
I can see, first formulated in Næss "Systematization of Gandhian Ethics," 1958, p.142
 
15 Spinoza, E3P6Dem, E2P3Sch.
 
16 Næss, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, 1989, p. 84f.
 
17 Spinoza, E4P68, E5P10Sch.
 
18 Næss, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, 1989, p.159.
 
19 Næss, Økologi, samfunn og livsstil, 1976, p. 270, 314; Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, 1989, p. 201.
 
20 Spinoza, E3P39Sch, E4P44Sch, E4Pr, E5P10Sch, cf. Næss, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, 1989, p. 84 f.
 
21 Ibid. E5P36Sch.
 
22 Ibid. E5P3Sch.
 
23 Ibid. E2P11Cor.
 
24 Ibid. E4P68Dem.
 
25 Ibid. E1P29Sch.
 
26 Næss, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, 1989, p. 84.
 
27 Næss, Økologi, samfunn og livsstil, 1976, p. 276-277; Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, 1989, p. 173-4.
 
28 Næss, Økologi, samfunn og livsstil, 1976, p. 320, (my trans.); Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, 1989, p. 173.f.
 
29 The term "shallow" is in inverted commas to show that it refers to an inadequate basic ecological understanding, 
and not to "shallow people". It is this "shallow" anthropocentrism that Næss wishes to change. He does not say that 
the "shallow" ones cannot be "deep" when it comes to other issues. The term "shallow" seems to imply, and has in 
fact been taken to imply, that those outside the environmental movement are "one-tracked" and "narrow-minded" in 
all areas, but this view cannot legitimately be attributed to Naess.
 
30 Næss, Ecology, Community and Lifestyle, 1989, p. 85
 
31 Spinoza, E4P66Sch, E5P42Sch; the proposition follows from putting the two references together.
 


On Ultimate Norms in Ecosophy T

Boston, Tim

Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Resourcism: An Ideological Analysis of the Wise Use Movement

Storey, Chris

The Trumpeter (1998) 
ISSN: 0832 6193 
All is Leaf: Goethe's Intuitive Intellect and 
Environmental Philosophy 
Chris Storey  
He who has art and science also has religion, 
He who has neither had better have religion! 
Goethe 
Two interrelated concepts lie at the heart of deep ecology's call for an ecological world-
view and the accompanying belief that the environmental crisis can be traced to 
philosophical problems at the heart of the dominant modern world-view. One concept is 
holism; the other is ecological consciousness. Deep ecologists hold that any viable and 
authentic environmental philosophy must be based on a deep-felt care for, and 
identification with, the non-human world. We need to adopt, both individually and 
culturally, an ecological consciousness. 
Metaphysical holism in deep ecology entails a world-view that can be contrasted with the 
dominant reductionist world-view of modern industrial society. Because of its concern 
with metaphysical holism, as in Arne Naess's use of Spinoza or as found in Devall and 
Sessions, deep ecology is inherently subversive in challenging the reductionist approach 
of the orthodox scientific world-view. We're reminded of Paul Sears' assertion that 
ecology is a subversive subject. Ecology is subversive because its basic premise is 
holism. (1) 
To propose that any real kind of science could be subversive is no longer a particularly 
startling claim to make. The ultimate claims to knowledge and objectivity of orthodox 
science have been undermined this century as philosophers of science such as Thomas 
Kuhn have demonstrated the historicity of scientific knowledge. As Henri Bortoft puts it, 
science is not an autonomous activity standing outside history. Science can be true, but it 
is not fundamental. If science is freed from the dogmatic scientism of the past, and if 
nature can manifest in different ways, then there is the possibility of a different kind of 
science, which is complementary to mainstream science. (2)
I am a native of the county of Cumberland in northwest 
England. I live in Kobe, Japan. Currently, I am researching 
environmental ethics at Konan University in Kobe, and teaching 
English in Osaka. My wife is Japanese and we have a five-year-
old son. Apart from family, my passion is wandering in forests 
and mountains. I have done so extensively in the UK, the 
American southwest and in Japan. This is the source of my 
interest in environmental philosophy, especially concepts of 
participatory consciousness and ecology. I studied Humanities at 
Middlesex Polytechnic in London and received my M.A. in 
Values and the Environment from Lancaster University in the 
UK. I am pursuing research towards my Ph.D. from Lancaster 
University.  
The participatory strand in the science of ecology suggests another approach to science. 
An Arcadian tradition can be traced through Gilbert White, Henry Thoreau, John Muir, to 
Aldo Leopold and beyond. The participatory methods practised by Thoreau and Muir, for 
example, bear a strong resemblance to the way of science developed and practised by 
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832), the German Romantic poet and scientist. (3) 
In Goethe's way of science, wholeness and ecological consciousness are understood as a 
necessary unity. Goethe's way of science is subversive, because at its heart is the 
understanding of wholeness. But a true understanding of wholeness can only be achieved 
through a different way of seeing. 
The authentic whole is not the totality of the parts that can be grasped intellectually, 
because there are no parts that are independent of the whole. An example of an authentic 
whole is the hologram, in which the whole is present in each of the parts. The parts 
cannot be regarded as separate entities; every part essentially is the result of its relation to 
the whole, and in fact contains the whole. The whole is encountered within the depth of 
the parts, and this can only be achieved with a different way of seeing. This way of seeing 
involves a transformation in the mode of consciousness, a switch from the "analytical" 
mode to the "intuitive" mode. The analytical mode is verbal, linear and logical. The 
intuitive mode is holistic, non-verbal and non-linear. 
Goethe pursued his way of science diligently for more than twenty years. His most 
famous contributions were The Metamorphosis of Plants(1790), and Theory of Colours 
(1810). In the latter, Goethe rebelled against the orthodox Newtonian do ctrine. In 
Newton's Opticks (1704), colours are explained by a quantitative mathematical method. 
In Newtonian science only primary qualities, such as number, magnitude and position, 
are taken to be real. Secondary qualities, such as colour, taste and sound, are regarded as 
the effects of primary qualities on the senses, they are subjective, and therefore, not really 
part of objective nature. Newton's project was to replace the phenomenon with a 
mathematical model that incorporates only the primary qualities; so, colour as "colour" is 
eliminated. (4) The Newtonian method became the driving force of positivist science. It 
was this method that Goethe opposed. 
In his work on colour, Goethe was seeking an explanation that reclaimed the qualitative 
experience of colours, establishing a method by which the quality of the colours is 
understood to be necessary, not contingent as it is in Newton's method. Goethe provided a 
phenomenology of colour, rather than an explanatory model. He came to understand the 
phenomenon of colour within the intensive depth of the phenomenon itself. With 
Goethe's method we do not try to explain the phenomenon in terms of some hidden 
mechanism, we enter into a dimension "within" the phenomenon, and the phenomenon is 
understood in terms of itself. Applied to the living world, Goethe's way achieves what 
Kant held was beyond the capacity of humans: the development of an "intuitive intellect," 
which alone can comprehend organic nature. Goethe did it and showed how anyone could 
achieve the same if they knew how to look. 
In Goethe's method, "how" to look is the key. We must switch our attention away from 
the verbal-intellectual mind and into "seeing." This way of seeing is active, not passive. 
We plunge into seeing the qualities of the phenomenon. This takes us away from the 
uniformity imposed on nature by the intellectual mind and we experience the non-
uniformity, richness and diversity of the world. In this way we arrive at the simplest case, 
the "pure phenomenon," the part that contains the authentic whole. This is the aim of the 
first stage of Goethe's method. What is particular in our normal way of seeing becomes 
universal in the intuitive mode. Goethe described the pure phenomenon as " an instance 
worth a thousand, bearing all within itself." The classic example is found in Goethe's 
observation that "all is leaf." For the rational mind, the leaf is just one part of the plant 
along with the petals and stamens. These parts are regarded as essentially separate and 
independent of each other. But with the switch to the intuitive mode of consciousness the 
leaf is understood in a universal sense as an "omnipotential form," rather than as a 
particular physical leaf. 
The process of active seeing is deepened in Goethe's subsequent stages, in "exact 
sensorial imagination," or guided imagery. We visualize the phenomenon in imagination. 
This is sensory and concrete, not abstract, attention is withdrawn further from the verbal, 
and consciousness is restructured into an "organ of holistic perception."(5) The purpose 
of this stage is to realize an element of the phenomenon not given to sense experience. 
This is the law, the organization or unity of the phenomenon. The intuitive understanding 
of the leaf, the one single organ, allows us to grasp the continuity of form of the plant. 
We can visualize the "coming into being " of the plant, its metamorphic sequence. With a 
reversal of perception, the universal is not a generalization abstracted from the particular; 
it is perceived as "shining in the particular." We see not an assemblage of parts, an 
analytical snapshot; we see the intensive depth of the plant, another dimension in which 
"it shows itself as itself."(6) 
Through this method, Goethe showed how a way of science could be conducted that 
begins with the world as we experience it. Modern science does the opposite, overriding 
the world of experience in favour of explanatory mathematical models that lie behind the 
scenes. While orthodox positivist science claims to start from experience it dismisses our 
direct, qualitative experience of the world. The secondary qualities are understood as the 
effect on the senses of primary qualities, which can be expressed mathematically. The 
secondary qualities are thus regarded as merely subjective experience and not really part 
of "objective" nature. All experience is reduced to a quantitative mathematical 
explanation. The sensory experiences of colours, the phenomena of colour, are replaced 
by a series of numbers. In this way, orthodox science involves an intellectual separation 
from the world of experience; the hallmark of orthodox science is detached 
intellectualizing. The success of positivist science has led to an ever-increasing alienation 
of the world of science from the world of everyday experience. (7) While positivist 
science replaces the phenomenon with numbers, Goethe's way of science dwells in the 
phenomenon. Goethe enters into the world and comes to an intuitive understanding of the 
wholeness within the intensive depth of the phenomenon. A Goethean account of holism 
is intelligible and accessible through practice of his way of science. Indeed, it can "only" 
be arrived at through practice. Goethe's beauty is that he describes a method that can be 
followed, it is eminently "doable." The work cannot be grasped by detached 
intellectualizing. It is practical, we get our hands dirty and we train the mind to function 
intuitively, rather than only intellectually. But the intuitive mode is precise, not vague. A 
high degree of discipline is essential to develop a Goethean practice. 
Through this hands-on practice, and with the use of guided imagination, we experience a 
deeper and more direct contact with the world of organic nature that has distinct 
implications for environmental ethics. We can consider two different kinds of approaches 
to environmental ethics. One approach involves the application of traditional ethical 
theories, the rational and universal normative theories of utilitarianism and deontology. 
These theories articulate rules and principles to guide our behaviour, answering the 
question "What ought I to do?" The other approach is of a fundamentally different kind. 
There is a shift away from abstracted rules toward our lived experience. This approach is 
in the tradition of the ethics of virtue of Plato and Aristotle. Rather than rules, moral 
character is the basis of such ethics. Instead of proposing an answer to the question "What 
ought I to do?", an ethics of character addresses the question "What kind of person ought 
I to be?"(8) 
The concept of "ecological consciousness" fits into this second approach. An ecological 
consciousness is bound up with our lived experience of the world. By practising Goethe's 
way of science, an ecological consciousness is developed. Goethean practice involves the 
switch from our customary verbal-intellectual mind, the analytical mode, to the intuitive 
mode of consciousness. Only through the intuitive mode of consciousness can we 
experience oneness with the world of organic nature, Kant's "intuitive intellect," rather 
than separation. By developing and nurturing our intuitive intellect we will develop 
feelings of empathy with and reverence towards the world of organic nature. We will 
literally change ourselves; our fundamental attitude toward nature will change. 
However, the intuitive mode of consciousness does not displace the analytical mode, the 
two are complementary; a healthy mental life is one of balance. In the same way, the 
ethics of care fostered by ecological consciousness does not displace the traditional 
normative ethical theories of utilitarianism and deontology. An ethics of care does not 
provide us with ethical imperatives, ought-to-dos; rather we develop a feeling of oneness 
or at-homeness within the world that inspires an ecological attitude. It is foundational, the 
"precondition" of other value systems. While we cannot convey the intuitive 
understanding of the world in verbal-intellectual language, we take with us into the world 
an understanding that will deeply influence our attitudes and actions towards the world, 
an ecological consciousness. 
The implications of a Goethean approach go beyond environmental ethics toward a 
comprehensive environmental philosophy. Goethean practice, as an essentially 
phenomenological practice, re-connects us with our place in Nature. If the Newtonian 
way of science separates us from the world, denying the qualities and reality of the world 
as experienced by our senses in favour of abstract explanations, then Goethe's way of 
science reveals our necessary connection with the world. As a phenomenological method, 
our whole body and being participates. Dwelling in natural phenomena with all the senses 
is necessary for us to focus on all the qualities of nature. We gain an intuitive 
understanding of the authentic wholeness of nature, the dynamic "primal source of all 
being," which enhances our experience of being part of the world. With continued 
practice and experience, we become more and more identified with and aware of our 
place in the world; we are back in our true home. We are back with ecology, the study of 
the home, the subversive science. Practice, ethics and ecosophy - the wisdom of the home 
- all come together in a genuinely holistic way of life, bound up in place. 
References 
Neil Evernden, "Beyond Ecology: Self, Place, and the Pathetic Fallacy," in The North 
American Review. Winter, 1978, p.16. 
Henri Bortoft, The Wholeness of Nature: Goethe's Way of Science, Edinburgh: Floris 
Books, 1996, pp.x-xi. 
Donald Worster, Nature's Economy: A History of Ecological Ideas. Cambridge: 
Cambridge University Press, 2nd Edition, 1994, Chapter 4. 
Bortoft .1996, p.18. 
Ibid., pp.77-82. 
Ibid., p.22. 
Ibid., p.18 
Joseph R. Des Jardins, Environmental Ethics: An Introduction to Environmental 
Philosophy. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Company, 1993, pp.150-151. 
Chris Storey: 
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All is Leaf: Goethe's Intuitive Intellect and Environmental Philosophy

Shallat, Todd

The Trumpeter (1998) 
ISSN: 0832 6193 
Idaho's Middle Landscape 
Todd Shallat  
Too far from Boise to smell the espresso, too close to the rush of the traffic racing from 
Nampa to Star, Rich Brown bumps a hay wagon through a field of nostalgia between 
romance and modernization, between working farm?oats, corn, pumpkins, alfalfa?and the 
tourist-based farming museum of an urbanized age. Come down for a three dollar hay 
ride. Come down for a soft-spoken lecture on holistic agriculture: chemical-free, labour-
intensive, old tools, old methods, old values?the "alfalfa- bet" of sustainable farming, the 
gospel according to Brown. 
"All things are connected," says Brown, looking east toward the subdivisions. "If we 
cover our land with asphalt then we are depleting our food supply." 1  
Brown farms his grandfather's homestead. Straw hat, plaid shirt, his grey beard sans 
mustache in the style of an Amish elder, he hails from "Dunkards" (Church of the 
Brethren) who baptized ("dunked") their children in water from the Phyllis Canal. A 
collector, he keeps a barn full of obsolete things. Hay knives. A horse-drawn hay mower. 
A fancy carriage from the 1890s. A fringe-topped wagonette surrey built from the parts of 
old automobiles. It is an ambience vaguely historic, but only by western standards. The 
wagon has rubber tires. Barn-door speakers blast Eric Clapton. Tourists silently wait for 
the King Throne port-a-potty, a garish aquamarine. 
It's not yet a Grey-Line tourist attraction. It's not yet a teaching facility or much of a 
spiritual center, although Brown hopes to move an old church to the site. It remains, 
however, an oasis beyond the electronic city, a place in between: in between suburbs, 
strip malls, and Simplot, and in between the excess of industrial farming and longing for 
wide-open space. Historians call it "the middle landscape."2 A geography first defined by 
Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden (1964), a famous book on cultural symbols, the 
middle landscape was psychic terrain where great writers like Twain, Melville, Whitman 
and Hawthorne came to mediate conflicting ideals. One ideal was material progress 
through industrialization?the machine. Another was escape into a rural Eden of tranquil 
living?the garden. Americans, said Marx, recoiled at uncut nature. They felt compelled, 
even predestined, to dominate wild places, yet they pined for a simpler, greener, more 
chaste America, a lost way of life. They turned to nature for inspiration without wanting 
to return there on a permanent basis. They fretted about modernization without losing 
faith in tools and machines. 
The idea of the middle landscape helped the Civil War generation strive for a pastoral 
place where the good shepherd made wise use of clever devices. Blurring old into new, 
nature into civilization, it reconciled the promise and peril of a strange new industrial age. 
Farmer Brown also fears modernization. He seems to believe, as Hawthorne put it, that 
"the inventions of mankind are fast blotting out the picturesque, the poetic, the beautiful 
out of human life."3 Yet his farm remains dependent on tractors, a fax, the interstate, 
Idaho Power, and a canal fed far up river by three federal dams. Simplicity. 
Sophistication. The farm seems to fit the Leo Marxian model of the machine in the 
garden?except for Marx's claim that Americans, by the 1860s, were abandoning the 
middle landscape. As pasture gave way to factory cities, as immigrants flooded the 
seaboard and the ideal of the genteel planter died at Shiloh and Bull Run, the machine 
took over the garden, sending America into shock. Soon the image of a green landscape 
became "ironic and bitter." 4 Americans, said Marx, gave up the pastoral vision before 
Idaho was even a state. 
So ends the story of the machine in the garden, closing on a sour note in the cynical 
decade before the Church of the Brethren settled in Ada County. But the ending is far too 
abrupt. Had Marx extended the story farther west and further in time he would have 
found an arid terrain of technological accommodation where rural people kept pastoral 
visions alive. 
Mythic thinking about paradise reborn through advanced technological systems has left 
Idahoans with grand expectations for the lava frontier. Mormon pioneers saw the land as 
a province of Zion. Intensely materialistic yet anti-capitalist, the Mormons of the 1880s 
repudiated the factory city, embracing, instead, a bucolic vision of a Canaan sustained by 
sophisticated dams and canals. Idaho also inspired an irrigation crusader named William 
Smythe. A newspaperman from Nebraska who featured the Snake River country in a 
futuristic book about high-tech agriculture, Smythe, in 1895, led a group of Chicago 
investors to New Plymouth near the Payette. It was a communitarian township laid out in 
the shape of a horseshoe, an experiment, said Smythe, in better, more "efficient," more 
"democratic" living through a "policy of material conquest." 5 Only through 
modernization could democracy hope to survive. 
Soon Idahoans were moving from words to action wherever rushing water brought dollars 
for dams: at Milner, where, in 1904, public land and private capital financed ditch 
irrigation; at Minidoka, an early hydro project; at Arrowrock, American Falls, Palisades, 
and Blackfoot. The desert, no longer "hopeless" and "discouraging," had become "a 
comparative Paradise," said Harper's Weekly. Rural Idaho had become "a miracle of 
modern American life."6  
Dam builders promised a pastoral homeland, a Magic Valley, a Treasure Valley, a 
Cambridge, an Oxford, a wet Shakespearian landscape as green as the rainy East. They 
assumed?like Thomas Jefferson, like the frontier historian Frederick Jackson Turner?that 
settlement meant agriculture, that the snowmelt was virtually boundless and its rush 
through vertical canyons was a gold mine of national wealth. Critics, however, have 
questioned that pastoral promise. One was architect Frederick Law Olmstead, the co-
founder and first superintendent of New York's Central Park. Touring California in the 
1860s, Olmstead denounced "the absurdity of seeking good pastoral beauty in the far 
West," and he cautioned respect for the brownish hues of desert mountains and prairies?a 
different kind of beauty, surely, but beautiful nevertheless. 7 Another voice of restraint 
was the one-armed explorer of the Colorado, John Wesley Powell. His Report on the 
Lands of the Arid Region sent to Congress in 1878 warned that the water bonanza would 
deplete soils, displace Indians, enrich the rich, impoverish the poor, and drive the small 
farmer off of the land. But the frontier beckoned. "Free land and the movement westward 
were ingrained expectations," wrote Wallace Stegner, a Powell biographer, a critic of 
dams. "Habit, politics, and real estate boosterism won out over good sense."8  
And so we have a farm policy built on the shaky assumption that the whole of society 
benefits when every drop of snowmelt is harnessed and farmers are enriched as a group. 
Never mind that one per cent of the farmers own more than a third of the West's farming 
lands. Never mind that the total number of farms has fallen by more than half since 1900, 
or that the big operators, squeezing out neighbours, have increased their acreage by 
almost thirty per cent in each of the last three decades. 9 Farming, say irrigators, is the 
wealth of the green republic, a public good. Farming gives us beets in the Idaho desert. It 
gives us potatoes, grain, fruit, alfalfa, onions and organic pumpkins?all watered from 
public projects for about 1,300 gallons per penny, a fraction of society's cost.10 Southern 
Idaho, in fact, uses more gallons per person than any place in the country. Per capita that 
water produces more millionaire farmers as well.
No wonder we yearn for sylvan landscapes, and not just on the ranch and the farm. Boise, 
a Sussex in a Sahara, takes pride in its manicured greenbelt and the lavish shade trees and 
lawns of English-style woodland parks. Boiseans love water so much they build in the 
floodplain. They crowd on the banks each year to celebrate the gentle beauty of a river 
that was a muddy and shifting torrent before Lucky Peak Dam. Craving a nature unlike 
nature, they decorate malls and community centers with country cottage Tudor motifs, as 
if English spelling (Boise Towne Square, Boise Centre on the Grove) granted 
respectability, as if the town was too hick to have a style of its own. 
Congestion, sprawl, the blight of the strip mall, the demise of the homestead farm?all 
spur interest in a smaller-is-better concept the ecologists call sustainable growth. Farmer 
Brown calls it "permaculture" but the principle is the mostly same: "Every generation," 
says Edith Brown Weiss, an environmental writer, "receives a natural and cultural legacy 
in trust from its ancestors and holds it in trust for its descendants." 11 Restraint and long-
term planning can sustain the next generation. Good farming. Good science. Respect for 
community. Respect for the earth. It sounds like progressive thinking, but the concept is 
hard to pin down. Do we sustain potatoes at the expense of the salmon? Do we allot 
loggers a sustained yield by planting seedlings in place of old growth? Sustainability 
implies an accurate way to compute the limits of nature. It assumes, writes historian 
Donald Worster, "that we can easily determine the carrying capacity of local and regional 
ecosystems."12 Nature?defiant, chaotic?is far too fickle for that. 
But credit Farmer Brown for a vision. Credit his defence of family tradition, even if 
machines threaten the garden, even if the green republic is increasingly hard to sustain. 
"Farming is therapeutic," says Brown, still preaching the gospel of hay rides. "We need to 
educate people. Kids who grow up in the city don't know what life's all about." 
Endnotes 
1. Rich Brown, interviewed by Todd Shallat, Meridian, November 20, 1995. 
2. See, for example, Howard P. Segal, Future Imperfect: The Mixed Blessings of 
Technology in America. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1994, pp. 13-
26. 
3. George Parsons Lathrop and Julian Hawthorne, eds., The Complete Works of 
Nathaniel Hawthorne, 15 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1882, 3:160. 
4. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. 
New York: Oxford University Press, 1964, p. 364. 
5. William Smythe, The Conquest of Arid America, originally published in 1899. New 
York: Macmillian Co., 1969, p. 11. 
6. Louise Morgan Sill, "The Largest Irrigated Tract in the World," Harpers Weekly 
October 17, 1908, pp. 11- 12. 
7. Frederick Law Olmstead, The Papers of Frederick Law Olmstead: Vol. 5, The 
California Frontier. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990, p. 451; the 
author thanks political theorist Michael Black for directing him to the Olmstead papers 
and this valuable quote. 
8. Wallace Stegner, Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs. New York: 
Random House, 1992, p. 51.
9. In 1969 only three per cent of the population was actively engaged in commercial 
farming and, in the Mountain West, the richest one per cent owned thirty-eight per cent of 
the farmland; see U.S. Department of Agriculture, A Time to Choose: Summary Report 
on the Structure of Agriculture. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Agriculture, 
January 1981, pp. 34, 75; see also, Donald Worster, The Wealth of Nature: 
Environmental History and the Ecological Imagination. New York: Oxford University 
Press, 1993, pp. 89, 92, 230. 
10. University of Idaho economists have estimated the "hypothetical" real cost of 
irrigation water at $28 per acre foot. In 1988 the Minidoka irrigators rented water to 
Idaho power for $2.50 per acre foot, although the cost of stored water can cost as little as 
12 cents per acre foot; see William Bailey and Roger Long, The Economics of Water 
Supply in Idaho. Moscow: University of Idaho, Agricultural Experiment Station, 1975; 
see also, Tim Palmer, The Snake River: Window to the West. Washington, DC: Island 
Press, 1991, p. 130. 
11. Edith Weiss Brown, "In Fairness to Future Generations," Environment, 32 (April 
1990), p. 6: for sustainable agriculture see also, Charles Wilkenson, Crossing the Next 
Meridian: Land, Water, and the Future of the West. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1992, 
pp. 297-298. 
12. Worster, Wealth of Nature, p. 154. 
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Idaho's Middle Landscape

Kent, Sheryl

Uncovering the Wisdom In Story: An Important Component in Wilderness Education

Frisk, Trudy

The Trumpeter (1998) 
ISSN: 0832 6193 
Never Again The Burning Times:  
A Book Review 
Trudy Frisk  
Introduction 
... anthropologists had established long ago that witches don't exist except 
as figments of the imaginations of the credulous.1  
So writes Loretta Orion in the introduction to Never Again The Burning Times. "Can a 
social scientist who is an initiated witch be taken seriously?" she wonders.2 The answer, 
after reading her ethnographic study of post-modern witchcraft and neo-paganism, is an 
emphatic "yes." The demographics, beliefs and behaviour of this important subculture are 
clearly described by a competent researcher who was a participant, not an aloof observer. 
Orion is an American anthropologist. She is also an initiate into the Minoan Sisterhood. 
During the decade she studied paganism, she attended numerous pagan gatherings, was a 
member of two covens, spent time with the Reclaiming Collective and Selena Fox. 
"...witchcraft and Neo- paganism ... constitute a revival of a rich and ancient tradition 
that supports individual initiative in acts of magic in relation to a religious perspective 
that embodies a divine, living and responsive universe." she concluded. 3  
Neo-paganism challenges anthropological truisms. Durkheim thought the soul was 
society individualized: pagans believe the animal nature is the personal essence. 
Orion locates today's witchcraft in a western occult tradition whose own roots extend to 
ancient Egyptian religions and the beginnings of Sumerian science. She highlights 
differences between British and American witchcraft, terming the British Craft a revival 
and the American an attempt to create a new religion. 
Review 
The book focuses on the witch as outsider, "contrary," visionary, and agent of change and 
on magic as transformative power. 
Orion, a former nurse, enquired closely into pagan attitudes to health, especially 
alternative forms of healing and personal responsibility for wellness. A chapter explores 
suffering as an opportunity to shape-shift. Shamanism, an important part of American 
paganism, is described in detail. 
The symbiotic relationship between paganism and ecology is clearly delineated. Orion 
makes the point that pagans, though they celebrate lunar and agricultural festivals, differ 
from practitioners of the Old Religion. To both the planet is living and holy, but present 
pagans see it as polluted and suffering, needing protection and healing. 
What is the end of myth and ritual? Why, to transform society. Orion feels that cultural 
radicals, more than violent or political efforts, "... challenge the "orderly state" on a very 
fundamental level - its view of the nature of reality."4 She notes that the Christian view of 
"... a static world, susceptible to change only at the hands of the Christian God…."5 is 
inimical to the pagan belief in immanent divinity of the changing earth, and a duty to 
interfere on its behalf. Because pagan philosophy threatens the established order, 
persecution is possible. 
I am wary of magic. I could wish for more emphasis on the positive antecedents of 
paganism. Nevertheless, Orion has captured the essence of neo-paganism, its creativity, 
lack of a guiding prophet, ecological conscience. It is, as she says, a social movement 
under construction. 
Conclusion 
Never Again The Burning Times is an important addition to any pagan's library. Non- 
pagans puzzled by this spiritual renaissance will find many of their questions answered in 
this well-written, thoroughly researched volume. In fact, it is used as a reference in some 
anthropology courses! 
Endnotes 
1. Never Again The Burning Times, Page 10 
2. Ibid. Page 10 
3. Ibid. Page 145 
4. Ibid. Page 240 
5. Ibid. Page 147 
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Never Again The Burning Times: A Book Review

Heyd, Thomas

The Trumpeter (1998) 
ISSN: 0832 6193 
Revisiting the Artistic Reclamation of Nature 
Thomas Heyd  
"The work of art is beautiful to the degree that it opposes its own order to 
that of reality..." 
Herbert Marcuse 1 
 
Introduction 
Despite significant public awareness of the ravages our civilization has caused in the 
natural environment, the pace of environmental degradation, unfortunately, continues 
virtually unabated. In this climate attention is increasingly coming to focus on ways in 
which the effects on the land caused by industrial society may be mitigated. This has 
spawned a growing interest in environmental restoration. Alongside this (perhaps 
Pyrrhic) attempt to "make nature whole again," we have witnessed a phenomenon called 
"Reclamation Art." I visited one of these sites of artistic reclamation of nature recently, 
and wrote up my impressions. Later, I researched and reflected further on this experience. 
The result is this two-part account: part narrative, part analysis. 
Visiting the Robert Morris Site 
Unremarkable from the outside, at first we drive past the site, but then recognize it and 
double back. The site is located on a steep hillside, half-surrounded by a busy two-lane 
road. Trucks are heard climbing the escarpment in first gear, strepitously. Airplanes are 
seen and heard overhead every few minutes, rising from the Seattle-Tacoma airport. A 
small stretch of the six-lane Interstate-5 highway, with its slowly moving traffic, can be 
made out in the distance. 
Light but steady rain falls out of a grey, darkening afternoon sky. A woman stops to give 
us a lift as we trudge up the hill, just paces after leaving our vehicle by the side of the 
road. She thought we had had car trouble. This is local helpfulness. 
Looking up, and toward the hill, one finds two sets of powerlines crisscrossing. Bordering 
the site itself, just beyond a little fence, there is scotch broom. Down in the valley, the flat 
roofs of the industrial parks of Kent fill the plain. 
What is this place? My companion derides my calling it art. Much less does she agree 
with my exclamation, "Magnificent!" One sees a pit with five broad terraces on the 
hillside, and three on the valley side. The terraces are covered with tall grass, yellowed 
and golden, fallen over like tufts of hair. Each of the terraces follows a wavy line 
connecting two ovals. It reminds me of the way embryos are pictured as lying in the 
womb; here the "head" is facing up alongside the escarpment, and the "tummy" is 
cuddled against the hillside. 
Standing on the rim of the hillock created by the three terraces facing the valley, one feels 
exposed, fully available to the roaring surrounds. As soon as one begins descending the 
terraces to the pit below, the roar of the place becomes muffled. Deep down in the bottom 
one feels in one's own private space.
The trucks ascend, still visible at the point where one's visual field and the road meet, and 
the continuing air traffic overhead now matters less. It is a place for looking up at the 
swinging curves of the terraces, at the bundles of golden grass. As one walks along the 
surprisingly dry (because well-drained) pit bottom one feels the caresses of the 
generously undulating terrain. In the lense of this deep and wide hole one suddenly 
realizes that exposure to prying eyes is greater than before on the rim. The sense of 
exposure competes with the sense of privacy first noted. 
What was this place before it became the "Robert Morris Site"? Apparently it was a 
gravel pit. Certainly it may have been a gash in the side of the escarpment. And now what 
is it? Not a celebration of nature. Nature stands stolidly in the background, as my 
companion points out, represented by a dark wall of needle trees on the top of the hill. 
This site does not constitute a "restoration of nature," however we may interpret this 
paradoxical term. It is a creation that uses the denuded and excavated gravel pit, the 
roaring "vehicularized" human beings on the adjacent road and in the sky, the brooding 
needle trees on the hill above and the exotic scotch broom on its side, to, surprisingly, 
turn it all into a place of sensuousness. It is a place of sensuous beauty despite the 
ubiquitous turmoil. 
As we walk down the steep hill along the shoulder of the road back to our vehicle, we 
note how the site abruptly hides itself behind its massive outer walls. From outside and 
below the rim of the pit this is just another pile of pushed gravel, poorly restored, offering 
the searching eye, at most, a few brambles and some young poplars. From the outside. 
Reviewing the Idea Behind Land Reclamation as Sculpture 
The Robert Morris Site (Untitled, Johnson Pit #30, 1979) located in the vicinity of Seattle 
was part of an experiment on a grand scale. The King County Arts Commission and the 
King County Department of Public Works had agreed to sponsor the reclamation of eight 
severely stressed sites, ranging from gravel pits to a strip of abandoned noisy land along 
the Seattle-Tacoma airport. The idea seems to have been to marry the availability of 
abundant "raw material" for earthworks with the redemptive power of art to bring about a 
new form of salvage of the land. 
We may ask ourselves why artists were engaged in these attempts at reclamation. Why 
were these sites not left to landscape designers to turn them into "parks," complete with 
the "pedestrian amenities—benches, picnic tables, parking lots and trash baskets," 2 
amenities the public probably prefers over art. Maybe the answer is that by allowing 
artists to take over these places constituted a convenient shift of responsibility away from 
the actual guardians - the civic authorities that administer, or at least authorize, the 
transformation of natural spaces into sources and sinks for industrial and consumer 
throughput. 
Perhaps it was held that if a gravel pit or a landfill site can be turned into an artwork, 
viewers would perhaps forget the troubled history and surrounds of these places. 
Distraction as a strategy for inducing loss of awareness has worked well enough in other 
circumstances. Why else is the promise of "recreational facilities," such as boat launches 
and fish stocking, offered in order to overcome public resistance to the "improvements" 
of our river valleys with dams that only benefit a minority? This raises the question that 
my companion considered, namely, "What makes these sites art?" That is, why should 
one not think of them as highbrow landscape engineering with a pretty label? Moreover, 
by what standards are these hybrids of land reclamation, sculpture and gardening, to be 
assessed? 
Art distinguishes itself from the rest of what human beings make by its perfection and its 
ability to point beyond the everyday. I propose that site-specific artworks are what Michel 
Foucault calls "heterotopias," spaces that contest all other spaces, spaces that are "as 
perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as our ordinary human-created spaces are messy, 
ill-constructed and jumbled." One need not suppose, though, that such artworks would 
necessarily constitute merely "pretty illusions," engendered through their capacity to draw 
our attention away from the everyday. This is well exemplified in Robert Morris' King 
County site. 
Insofar as this site has a certain perfection exhibited in its design, it provides an encounter 
with beauty. Insofar as it is an inscription of sensuousness on a heavily disturbed portion 
of escarpment, it draws us away from the harsh realities of our everyday life. 
Nonetheless, the artwork only muffles the roar of all-consuming "artifactuality" that 
surrounds it on every side; we continue hearing and seeing the car and airplane traffic in 
the grey background. 
The site teases and pleases the eye with its undulating contours, while we are also staring 
at man-high tree stumps, coated with dark preservative material, the only reminders that 
the site may once have been part of the forest. The solemn, brooding wall of needle trees 
on the top of the hill, located beyond the confines of the site, starkly confirm the anti- 
illusory character of this artwork. 
Robert Morris had warned the public: "It would perhaps be a misguided assumption to 
suppose that artists hired to work in industrially blasted landscapes would necessarily and 
invariably choose to convert such sites into idyllic and reassuring places, thereby 
redeeming those who wasted the landscape in the first place." 4 Rather, Robert Morris' 
artwork performs a sublation (Aufhebung), that is, a simultaneous replacement and 
preservation of the site's history. This earthwork turns the immolation of nature into 
beauty - while putting that same immolation on view. 3  
Endnotes 
1. . Herbert Marcuse, Aesthetic Dimension Boston: (Beacon Press. 1978), p. 64. 
2. Nancy Foote, "Monument-- Sculpture--Earthwork," Artforum, Vol. 18, No. 2 (October 
1979), 32-37, p. 37. 
3. Michel Foucault, "Of Other Spaces," diacritics. (Spring 1986), 22-27, p. 27. 
4. Quoted by John Beardsley, Earthworks and Beyond (New York: Abbeville/Cross River 
Press, 1984), p. 94, from Robert Morris, "Robert Morris Keynote Address," in 
Earthworks: Land Reclamation as Sculpture. Seattle: Seattle Art Museum, 1979, p. 16. 
5. I am indebted to Lisa Edwards for stimulating discussions concerning this artwork. 
Copyright retained by author(s)  
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