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Perspectives on the roots of today's environmental crisis can, it is generally thought, be divided into three opposed camps. Identifying the central tenets of each camp, however, is no easy task. There is considerable variation in the claims made even within a single camp, and this sort of variation is exacerbated by clear differences in the philosophical acumen, scientific scholarship, and commitment to even simple principles of logic exhibited by different members of a given camp. Nonetheless, roughly, very roughly, we can divide the camps along the following lines, lines that will be severely qualified as the discussion proceeds. The first camp regards the environmental crisis as rooted, in a straightforward manner, in the human domination of nature, and this is a primary form of domination from which other forms can derive. Thus, oppression of human by human is often, on this view, considered a secondary or derivative phenomenon; derivative upon the oppression of nature by humans. The answer to both forms of oppression, and whatever crises they spawn, is to rethink our relationship to nature, to reconstruct this relationship so that it is no longer an essentially aggressive, hence oppressive, one. The recommended reconstructive strategy involves some form of identification with nature: the idea of the isolated Cartesian self should be rejected and in its place substituted an expanded self, a self that is properly part of nature and not opposed to it. This sort of view is often referred to as deep ecology. Accordingly, I shall talk of the deep ecology camp.

DOI: 10.1057/9780230286269_10

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