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Life, Ecology, and Anthropocentricism: A Review of Murray Bookchin's Criticism on Deep Ecology of Arne Naess

Tae-Hyeon Song 1

1이화여자대학교

Candidate

ABSTRACT

According to Arne Naess, the "shallow ecology movement" fights against pollution and resource depletion. Its central objective is, for the Norwegian philosopher. the health and affluence of people in the developed countries. Criticizing the anthropocentricism which is inherent in the traditional ecology, he advocates the "deep ecology". This new ecology calls for a shift from an anthropocentricism world view to an ecocentricism. As deep ecology grows, so do the counter attacks. The academic arena who is most critical of deep ecology is Murray Bookchin's social ecology. In this paper, I will review the main concept of deep ecology, ‘biospherical egalitarianism’, and the criticism of the social ecology community on it. In particular, I introduce the view of social ecology, which defines deep ecology as anti-humanism, and examine whether that argument should be persuasive or not. I followed Warwick Fox, defining the Bookchin's view as "the fallacy of misplaced misanthrophy" and I want to prove that it is not appropriate to criticise the view of Arne Naess, a leading scholar of deep ecology, as misanthrophy. However, while modern multinational companies are destroying the lives of the peoples of the Third World, I want to respect the Bookchin's view of social ecology which insists that the ecological crisis is caused more by sociopolitical factors than the world view as 'anthropocentricism'. At the same time, I emphasize that the ecologists should not focus more on the difference between ecologies and the criticism of one another ; instead, the ecologists should focus more on mutual similarities. By doing so, we can concentrate on caring for both human and animals & plants oppressed in the natural world.

Citation status

* References for papers published after 2023 are currently being built.