Deep Ecology-blog 6

Arnie Naess addresses this new idea of deep ecology. To Naess deep ecology is not only addressing the effect of humans and their consumerism, but also what caused these problems. He looks at the whole picture: what is wrong, what can we do to fix this problem, and what shallow ecologists don't mention, what created this problem. I think of this as a math problem. Shallow ecologists look at the answer, but don't look at the equation in front of the equal sign. They have the answer, but they don't look at the problem that the answer solves. If you don't know exactly how the problem came about, and what the problem is, how can you solve this problem?

Among Naess's criteria for a movement to be deep ecologically I feel that the most important is rejecting all claims of superiority. This is what Switzer was talking about as racism. We can not look at just humans as a superior race. We are one of the living species on this Earth, not necessarily the most superior. We assign value to other species based on how we feel their value to us is. Who can decide that a dog is more important than a human. Only a human can vocalize these concerns but us. We need to see all species as equal, and treat them as so.

Kohak introduces the idea of flannel ecology throughout this section. he first talks about how these men in the flannel shirts saw the problem, and then took action to fix the problem. These people didn't lobby in congress to stop deforestation, they went out and planted their own trees. Kohak wants people to have this view, he wants people to take action, to roll up their sleeves as get dirty.

In the footnote i didn't exactly get what he was trying to say except that there is a distinction between deep ecology and depth ecology, but i am not exactly for sure what that is. I think it may have to deal with depth ecology looking at all sides of the problem and looking at all solution.