Deep Ecology

Whether its watching a whale Jump up in the air and seeing him crashing back into the water, or looking at all of the trees leafs changing colors in the fall time; nature is a beautiful thing. In the past, traditional Native Americans once cared about the land. The grass, trees, rocks, and everything else had value. Nowadays most people are moving away from these ideas and moving towards a capitalist mindset, only caring about their own personal gain. Deep ecology is defined as “an environmental movement and philosophy that regards human life as Just one of many equal components of a global cosystem” (Google).
Arne Naess was a Norwegian philosopher who coined the term Deep Ecology. It may seem very similar to traditional Native American thought, but there are a few differences. In traditional Native American thought, they believe that everything is sacred, has value, and is alive. Deep ecologists do not feel the same way, they believe objects hold value but not all things are living. For example, if you were to pick up a rock and show it to a deep ecologist, he or she would say that the rock is not living. According to traditional Native American thought, they would say hat the rock is valuable, living and is sacred (Professor Bill Weiss).
Arne Naess and George Sessions created the eight principles of deep ecology. They are the eight principles that all deep ecologists follow. The fifth principle states, present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening (The Anarchist Library). For example, 137 species of animals are becoming extinct each day, which adds up to 50,005 species disappearing every year, because of deforestation (Oocities). If we don’t start doing something about this issue he world’s animal population will become extinct, and that’s only from deforestation.

That doesn’t include all the garbage and chemicals that we are dumping on the earth. Those also have an effect on animals all across the world. And soon this will start to effect the human population. People will start to become sick and they won’t have anything to eat because animals across the world were killed off or become extinct, and the vegetables you want to eat won’t be edible because the chemicals that were dumped on the earth reached the plants you want to eat and ontaminated them. This could potentially lead to the human population becoming extinct.
I’m not saying this is going to actually happen or be an immediate result of our actions but this is what the world is coming to. The companies are the indirect problem in this issue. It’s the population’s demand that keeps these companies going which makes us the direct source to the problem. Almost everyone is caught up in the capitalist mentality, only caring about themselves and seeing how much money they can make. And when that happens they go out and buy more products which ave negatively affected the environment.