Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Forty-two years on from its publication, Devall’s paper and its clear critique – now realised in the predicted failure of the movement to make change – deserves a much greater audience. To make meaningful change, we must realise the world within the viewpoint outlined by deep ecological ideas.
We may be meeting our schools’ curriculum targets, but in many cases we are still missing the larger aims of environmental awareness, our essential inter-connectedness and inter-being with the planet we live on, and thus many teachers, and their students, are not acting out of deep ecological understanding or deep ecological commitment.
Once we experience ourselves as inseparable part of the web of life we realize that true well-being for us can only happen in harmony with the whole and all of its parts. When other humans or living beings suffer, we cannot stay untouched. This is what Arne Naess meant when calling for an “ecological self”.
Interview with Fritjof Capra author of The Tao of Physics (1975) and co-author of the Systems View of Life – A Unifying Vision (2014).
I live on a farm that was once part forest, part swamp. I live with animals both domesticated and wild, with plants, with flowers, with a garden. My grandparents lived here, my parents, my siblings and I, and then my children too. I walk on the land every day and never get bored. There is always something new to see and learn. In the summer, I sit on my deck, which overlooks a pond, a field, and past that, the lake. Barn swallows nest over my head. Paper wasps build small grey cones among the swallow nests.
