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At 19:25 22/05/99 -0700, Julie Johnston wrote:
> I have taken the liberty of copying [a] concise summary of DE from the UK.
> It can be seen that DE is not an either/or approach to problems, be they
> psychological, philosophical or environmental.
> DE as exlained here is a complement to other disciplines or approaches and
> indeed to science generally, and should act as an integrating influence.
> Having said that .. I would like to hear from seasoned deep ecologists ...
>
** I applaud Julie's decision to pass on the DE Educ. Inst.'s outline. I
see it as a good basis for discussion, better than any one person's views,
even if that person is Arne Naess.
** As someone who has been critical of almost everything for most of my
life, I decided to call myself atheist a few years ago, and recently
extended this to say: "if concepts like beauty, inspiring music (which I
certainly know well), religion and philosophy would cease to exist if
humans cease to exist, then the concepts are artifacts and have no reality
outside of their effects on humans".
** Since humans are a small but no longer insignificant part of life on
earth, I suppose their ideas (including philosophies) matter to the extent
that those ideas can affect what homo sapiens does to life on earth. That
is, the criterion for value is not that some person or group of people
believes or even acts on these ideas, but how large the effect is, on life
on earth.
** On this scale of value or importance, deep ecology and all other ways
of thinking favourably about maintaining and improving (all) life on earth,
are very close to zero, certainly in 1999.
** So the only high-value philosophy or view-point is the
high-production-and-consumption avaricious power-based view of the current
rich and their corporations. (Rich on a world scale, i.e. including a
majority of North Americans; possibly a majority of people in OECD countries.)
** You can see why I've been depressed for the last 5 years (until about
last August: early Spring, for us), and am still pessimistic.
** Perhaps my current views, being non- (though not anti-)DE, are
unwelcome here. In any case, I'll dole them out sparingly, in case they
have a bigger effect than I think they should.
David.
(David MacClement) mailto:d1v9d@bigfoot.com (@ is:@)
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Delphi/3142/index.html#top
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