Summary
Today's Deep Ecology seems to regard technology as an evil force, something alien to the natural world, loosed almost by divine mistake on this planet. These new energies are not regarded as legitimate expressions of sentience, universal lifeforce, or granted the respect we accord to "natural processes", but rather as something wrong, something to be controlled and repressed. Deep ecologists seem to have the same fear and loathing toward today's out of control technology as humans have had until just recently toward uncontrolled Nature, with her savage, untamed wastelands. They call technology inhuman, cruel, and heartless, using the same words we once used to describe cruele wildernesse-and like humans of the 19th century waging war on wild nature, environmentalists today long only to conquer technology, to subdue and control it, as we have nature herself.
Such a dualistic view of our world, neatly partitioned into good, pure nature, and bad aggressive technology, does not lead to a complete relationship with everything that is. It perpetuates the same kind of good guy bad guy scenarios that we have always been prone to indulge in, and leaves a bad taste. Specially as the bad guys seem to be winning everywhere you look. Why not take deep ecology all the way to the heart of what is really wild on this planet: why not include, in the roster of the wild and sacred, Everything That Moves? Since everything that exists moves, we'd be done with all this picking and choosing, and all the worry and strife that go with that. We'd have a complete, ready made, flawless sacred outlook. A nondual ecology.
The ambivalence of deep ecologists toward technology is clearly expressed in the recent book, Gaia's Hidden Life, by Nicholson and Rosen. This contains some of the best recent thinking in deep ecology-wonderful arguments for the recognition of living being in the natural world, even among the rocks and stars, etc. But almost every one of the 27 authors, from James Lovelock to Thomas Berry, unequivocally rejects technology as an invalid, unnatural, even wicked form of existence. Meanwhile, they idealize the vanishing dream of free, wild biological systems. They seem to want to restore them to their erstwhile splendor-as though evolution ever moved backwards! This is wishful thinking, like when we imagined the earth was the center of the universe, or that humans represented the culmination, and hence the end, of evolution.
This point of view is called biocentrism, and is proudly opposed to anthropocentrism, which is supposed to be outmoded and provincial, a naive and self-serving 'humanist' outlook. But to me biocentrism is little better. It is based on the assumption that evolution reached its pinnacle not with Man, but with Biology. But evolution isn't like that. She never reaches a pinnacle. She never rests, and she never ever turns back.
A contemplative biologist would not want to be 'centric' about any stage of the evolutionary process. Evolution unfolds continually and mysteriously out of itself: She has no goal, claims no achievements, and is uninterested in any past or future states. Just this mysterious present moment unfolding, in which there is most definitely and certainly nothing to cling to. Sound familiar? Where have we heard about this before? All we see in the world around us, just as with what we find in our own minds is good, or at least authentic, valid, workable. There is nothing to reject, nothing to protect, nothing to be centric about. Why can't we be as wise in our understanding of the evolution of this planet as we are gradually becoming about the evolution of our own states of mind?
Biology is a series of provisional sketches for negentropic systems. These systems are built out of and on top of and into each other in endless shells of interdependent co-arising fields, just as the microbial world is built out of and on top of and into the material world of the four elements, just as the multi-celled (i.e. multi-microbe) animals and plants and insects are built out of and into the microbes, and we humans ourselves are built out of and onto the animals and plants. The world of technology, cultural behaviors and abstract & concrete symbolic structures are likewise built out of, on top of, and into human brains, emotional drives and bodies. This is planetary symbiosis at work.
A new form of Life has arisen on this planet, which could be called the Technobia. Its power and speed of evolution lead instantly off every scale on which we are accustomed to measure living systems. It is young, but terrifyingly, thrillingly, overwhelmingly vigorous. It is feeding on us humans, just as we feed on the plant and animal kingdoms, and just as they feed on the microbial kingdoms, who rest in turn on the material universe. We are not in control of this process, we are merely a part of it. It is happening to us, and in spite of us, as well as because of us. In this case we are the host organism, the medium in which technobiotic lifeforces are finding their fertile soil. We humans, with our obsolete bodies, easily exploitable emotional drives, and our fabulous brains, are the primeval soup our symbiotic technology partners have come to live in.
What this means is that purely biological evolution is no longer the main focus of life on this planet. It's become a subplot, relegated in its wild forms to out of the way corners, to empty lots, roadsides, and cracks in the sidewalk of civilization. It's been built over on top of, subsumed, in the best evolutionary style, by the techno-biotia.
So in any discussion of ecology, whenever one refers to rocks, clouds, rivers and mountains, microbes animals and plants, one should include kitchen tables, cars and computers, stuffed animals and nuclear reactors, as well as abstract symbolic systems such as mathematics and music, and belief or behavioral morphologies, including social systems, religions, culture. etc. These are all valid forms of life, if we or rocks and clouds are.
Deep ecology is good, but not always useful in everyday life. We need a working ecology, something tough and flexible, that you can use to save the world with. A practical ecology might come in two parts, view and practice, as follows:
The View. Reality is as perfect today as it has ever been. The world in this moment, along with one's mind in this same moment, is the Great Perfection spoken of in the teachings. It must be enjoyed just as it is, pollution, warfare, famine & poverty, confusion and materialistic greed and all, no matter how unlikely, unhappy or sorry a specimen it may seem to be (world or mind). Ecosystems like minds are always in perfect balance, even when they're neurotic, ill, confused or going extinct, miserably and unnecessarily.
The Practice. A dynamic ecology has got to work in a world which is changing from one moment to the next. Ecology cannot be based on trying to preserve ecosystems at some particular stage of their evolution, no matter how beautiful that stage may have been. This is like trying to prevent our children from growing up, or our old people from dying. It is a form of materialism to be overly attached to a special set of God's Works, and is doomed to failure in any case.
We will never "get" our dream of attractive, healthy ecosystems-they will always be collapsing around our ears. This is what ecosystems do! They have a natural lifespan, which in addition to being short, is frequently terminated 'unnecessarily' early by accident or misfortune. Just like our own lives. Wanting to freeze ecosystems at a certain charming stage of their existence is like our other foolish dream of always being young, attractive and healthy ourselves. Good luck!
The only ease lies with the process of evolution itself. Sound ecology must be based on respect for God's creative/destructive working process, not on a childish clinging to pretty toys He may have made. Then we can live in this world, help it out a bit, and go with, lean into its mysterious unfolding.
Everything That Moves
To combine this challenging view with the challenging practice, one simply regards everything that moves as a form of sacred activity. The mad materialist technobic frenzy gripping the planet is nothing other than this. There is only One Thing happening, not some things that are good and others that are bad. This includes fragrant ecosystems, fresh and unsullied in wilderness areas on spring mornings, and it includes urban industrial megagrid, ghettos & famine zones, materialist mind greed, the extinction of wild animal species and the slavery and torture of 'domesticated' ones. Life and death. Even television.
Everything we love will die, and everything we hate will live, and vice versa, and we will never be rid of such problems. No contemplative would want the buddhas and patriarchs to catch him trying to escape death, much less get rid of it. Death is sacred activity. What is happening on this planet today is the sacred activity of life and death, which we sometimes call evolution. It is perfect as it stands, flawless, without blemish. But as Suzuki Roshi said, there is always room for improvement too.
So it's proper to fight and struggle with the situation, to take care of each other, and try to save a few suffering sentient beings. We must do this!, and we do, just as we struggle to improve the 'climate' , 'landscape' and evolutionary process in our own minds and hearts. The thing to be careful about is not to reject what is ugly and cruel, dangerous and poisonous, even the heartless machines, the computers & TV's, cars & highways, nuclear bombs, animal and plant slavery and torture, and money.
These are our sacred enemies. They might even be our sacred friends, one never knows for sure. We should not try to know for sure. It's none of our business. Friend and enemy are not distinguished on this level. It's disrespectful to try to do so. To the enemy, one offers a deep bow, as deep, and as filled with respect as one offers to one's friends and teachers. This bow is offered to everything without reservation. It is a form of protection. It saves us from attachment and illusion, and in the end, from the wrong sort of despair.