Day 1: Introductions and Arne Naess

 "Human nature is such that, with sufficient comprehensive maturity, 
we cannot help but identify ourselves with all living beings."     
-Arne Naess, Ecology of Wisdom

We started with simple introductions and an examination of the course syllabus.  According to the syllabus, this course is "...by design is an invitation for educators and professionals in leadership roles to explore the manners in which ecological theories occasion a view that all life is fundamentally one..."  Once this viewpoint is understood than it allows us as educators and leaders to redefine traditional roles in the pedagogy of education and praxis.

We then turned to the life of Arne Naess and a documentary about him entitled Crossing the Stones:  A Portrait of Arne Naess~An Intimate Biography of the Nowegian Founder of Deep Ecology.  Released in 1993, the film traces the life and philosophical evolution of Arne Naess.  For those of you unfamiliar with Naess, he was a well known Norwegian philosopher and alpinist who preferred to live in a simple cabin nestled under a mountain and located high above treeline.  From there he contemplated life and wrote many of his seminal works including The Ecology of Wisdom, Skepticism, and Spinoza and the Deep Ecology Movement.  Members of today's deep ecology movement ascribe Naess as one of the founders as well.

There are many other famous writers who connected deeply with the land as Naess did.  Most notably for me are Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, Terry Tempest Williams, and Edward Abby.  Like many of his predecessors, Arne tends to come from status of prestige that blesses him with the time and resources to contemplate his ideas more deeply.  What strikes me as different about him is how traumatic world events such as the Nazi invasion of Norway during World War II and his awareness of human suffering and struggles for justice in India and other parts of the world influenced his writing as his thinking evolved.

By the mid to late sixties, Naess was well on his way to another deep transformation.  He himself describes the influence Rachel Carson's Silent Spring had on his growing awareness of an ecological crisis.  This would move him to environmental activism throughout the rest of his life and he is noted for his participation in Greenpeace Norway and the Green Movement as well.  I will be examining his writing in more detail in another entry.