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"We are all one life"

Extracts from Ch 3 of Vernon Pratt, Jane Howarth and Emily Brady, Environment and Philosophy, London, Routledge, 2000; by permission.

Somehow, it is said, human beings have set themselves apart from nature, and it is this that leads to the dangerous ways we have of exploiting the world about us.

Understood properly, human beings are part of nature. If we understood that we would understand that destroying the prairie or exterminating the wolf or polluting the sea are all forms of self-mutilation. Insofar as we are part of Nature our well-being is an aspect of the well-being of Nature as a whole. John Donne's famous lines refer most obviously to the community of human beings to which he is urging we should all remember we belong. But - it is said - there is a wider point to be made. As human beings we are parts not only of the community of humanity but of the community which makes up nature as a whole. "We are all One Life", in the words of Coleridge. So the bell tolls for us not only when a fellow human being dies but at the destruction of any member of that vastly wider community which is Nature itself.

The most sustained development of the idea that "we are all one life" comes in contemporary philosophy from a school of thought which calls itself 'deep ecology', associated first and foremost with the name of Arne Naess. This school adds to the idea of unity the notion of 'self-expression' as a goal: the unity that is Nature is motivated by a drive towards self-expression.

IDENTIFICATION OF THE HUMAN BEING WITH NATURE - DEEP ECOLOGY

At the core of deep ecology are two ideas that were developed by Romanatic thought at the turn of the 18th Century, - the concept of 'self expression', and its importance in understanding human life, and the idea that the human being is to be seen as a part of, and not apart from, the wider whole that is Nature at large.

When Arne Naess (b. 1912), as the leading spirit of the deep ecology movement, gives prominence to these two points taken together, however, something quite striking emerges. The self whose destiny it is to achieve self-realisation is not the individual human being. It is rather an entity that is not properly recognised in conventional thought, the entity that consists in the human being and other elements of living nature together.

This appears to be at first sight an extraordinarily radical claim, one which would entail the overthrow not simply of so many of our beliefs but our whole conception of what a belief was. (We would have to attribute contradictory beliefs to the same entity, for example, since when you and I appear to disagree over something these would be thoughts that in fact both belonged to the one thing that was Nature.)

Observations like these must surely miss the point. The thesis that we are parts of a greater whole must surely be being misunderstood if it appears vulnerable to this kind of banality. Yet it is difficult to understand clearly how exactly it is to be understood in a more grown-up way. What exactly is the difference between our being individuals with intimate and intricate dependencies on nature, and our being not individuals in our own right but parts of a greater whole?

If its abstractions are not altogether transparent, the practical message of deep ecology is powerful. It has been formulated as a kind of 'manifesto' by Naess, its architect.

END

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