Deep ecology holds that the non-human world has intrinsic value independent of any use to humans, and that a just politics must be reordered around the flourishing of the whole biotic community rather than human interests alone. It decentres the human as the measure of value.
Its founder, the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, distinguished it in 1973 from 'shallow' environmentalism, which protects nature to benefit people — cleaner air for human health, forests for human recreation. The deep version instead calls for a change of worldview toward biospherical egalitarianism (all living things have an equal right to flourish) and an enlarged sense of self that identifies with the wider natural world.
It supplied the philosophical backbone for the radical wing of environmentalism — wilderness preservation, the platform of groups like Earth First!, and a broader current of ecological spirituality — offering a deeper 'why' than pragmatic conservation, one rooted in reverence rather than resource management.
As politics it points toward a substantial reduction in human population and consumption and a decentralized, bioregional organization of life lived within nature's limits. Its adherents differ over how far to push these implications and by what means.
It has drawn sharp criticism, including from other ecologists: social ecologists like Bookchin charged that blaming humanity-in-general for ecological harm obscures which humans and which systems are responsible, and that calls to cut population can carry ugly, misanthropic implications. Deep ecologists dispute that these follow from their principles.
Every axis here takes humanity as the frame within which politics happens. Deep ecology's defining move is to reject that frame — to make the biosphere, not the human community, the subject of value — so the entire instrument measures it against a centre it exists to displace.
Anti-industrial and decentralist, liberty-side, but genuinely hard to locate because its organizing axis is not economic at all.
Extends equality beyond the human — 'biospherical egalitarianism' — which strains an axis built to weigh liberty and equality among people.
Change-oriented and often radical, calling for a deep shift in worldview and a decentralized, bioregional reordering of life.
Universalist to the point of extending moral standing to the entire biosphere, with community redefined as the biotic whole rather than any human group.
Redefines the self as identified with the natural world, so neither the individual nor the human collective is the true unit — a position the axis cannot hold.
- Arne Naess, The Shallow and the Deep, Long-Range Ecology Movement, 1973
- Bill Devall and George Sessions, Deep Ecology: Living as if Nature Mattered, 1985