"Deep Ecology" and the Revival of Natural Right

EW popular movements in this century can claim as much success as environmentalism in influencing American public policy. Although spokesmen for the movement lament its failure to reach all its goals, its achievements are nonetheless astonishing. In a single generation (since Earth Day in 1970), environmental concerns have become part of the permanent agenda of government (Mann, in Kamieniecki et al. 1986: 20), to be heeded in everything from energy policy and industrial design to transportation and defense planning. However, the environmental movement has been less successful in thinking through the implications of its own victories. If environmentalists could increase their influence over policy-making and eventually shape society as they wished, what changes would ensue? What would an ecologically sensitive world look like, and how would its inhabitants live? These are questions that intersect with the traditional subject matter of political philosophy. They do not suggest that environmentalists ought to become utopians, but merely that the movement's root assumptions and the ultimate ends of its program need clarification. In addressing such issues, we wish to offer a reinterpretation of certain trains of thought already well established in environmentalist literature. We take as our departure point the observations and experiences of a long line of sojourners in nature, who have struggled to articulate a vision of what humans could become if only they acknowledged the accumulated wisdom of the world and shaped their lives in accord with it. We argue that the appropriate conceptual system for clarifying the aims and rationale of ecological politics is a modernized version of the classical natural right tradition as understood by Aristotle and his successors. Of course, most defenders of strong pro-ecology positions would initially demur, since Aristotle's anthropoand logocentrism are anathema to them. Nevertheless, many environmental thinkers unwittingly have resurrected two key ideas of classical right: that there is an order in nature providing normative standards for evaluating laws, actions and policies, and that