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Bull Hill
by David Rothenberg : Editor, Terra Nova

Professor Naess's Alpine Garden

Arne Naess, ninety-four years old, may very well be the last surviving member of the Vienna Circle, that erstwhile group of grave philosophers who set the previous century on the steel road to logic and reason. Naess is the only one left to poke his nose into the twenty-first century. Back in 1930, sent to Vienna to become a concert pianist but soon stuck in the roundtable with analytic thinkers like Carnap and Quine, the eighteen-year old Norwegian pipsqueak raised his hand to complain, "I think you are spending too much time quoting Wittgenstein. Why can't I be quoted a bit more?" He has been causing trouble like this his whole life.

Arne Naess with majestic mountain peak behind.
  Arne Naess at Nasjonalfjell, Norway.
Photo by Frode Jenssen, courtesy www.stetind.nu.

A few years later, when his analytic buddies were talking on and on about a philosophy based on "common sense," without metaphysical flights of fantasy and other forms of continental mush, Naess wrote up a questionnaire, and passed it out on the street. There was only one question, "How do you decide what is true?" If there really was such a thing as a common sense notion of truth, everyone would presumably give a similar answer. However, they all gave a range of answers, similar to the various positions held by philosophers throughout history. So much for that theory. What did they expect? The other theorists never thought of going out to ask people what they thought.

Naess has spent a lifetime in many areas of the philosophic enterprise, from working in the wartime Resistance against the Nazis to defining democracy for UNESCO to systematizing the principles of Gandhian nonviolence as a coherent philosophy. What he is most known for today, however, is for coining the phrase "deep ecology" to describe a brand of environmentalism that believes that we must fundamentally change our ideas about how humanity fits into the natural world before we can dig our way out of the environmental crisis that befalls humankind and the planet. We need to cultivate an identification with the natural world, where all living things have an equal right to live and flourish. We need a sense of human humility, where we never disturb too much. Will we succeed? "I am optimistic," Naess now muses after a lifetime trying, "but for the twenty-second century, not for this one."

Deep ecology has often been taken as the guiding philosophy of the worldwide wilderness movement, which believes that pure, wild nature far from human influence is the most important part of the planet to preserve. Advocates of this view are often criticized by another kind of ecologist, those that care most about tending the Earth like a garden, sticking close to our backyards, tilling and shaping the land rather than sealing it off like a pristine temple. These gardening environmentalists sometimes find Naess to be too extreme, not realistic, misguided by sequestering nature away from the reality of human culture.

Now Naess responds by pointing out that there is no schism between those who want to save the garden and those who love wild places. His favorite place in the world, where he feels most at home, is at his mountain hut far above the timberline beneath the whale-shaped mountain Hallingskarvet in central Norway, a three-hour walk uphill through the tundra from the train station at Ustaoset. He built this place in 1936, and it still feels "six thousand feet above men and time," as Nietszche once said. The cabin is called "Tvergastein," which means "crossing the stones."

Book - Ecology, community and lifestyle, by Arne Naess; translated and edited by David Rothenberg.Inside the cabin is an intellectual world brightened by humor and curiosity. The library, inside a room the size of a large closet, is impressive. The complete works of Aristotle and Plato, handbooks of chemistry and physics, novels of Dostoyevsky. Teach-yourself manuals for Rumanian, Icelandic, and Chinese. The most extensive Sanskrit-English dictionaries available. Buddhist logic, Marxist rhetoric, formerly the complete edition of Auguste Comte in French, until it was burned for fuel on a particularly cold winter night. Generations of rock climbing equipment, from heavy leather boots and steel pitons to light carabiners and high-tech nylon shoes. There are personal contraptions only the master understands: kerosene lamps that heat tea and soup at the same time, solar-powered reading lights that work even if the sun doesn't shine for weeks.

And just outside the door is a tiny grassy space, ringed with a small stone wall. "Watch out," he warns all visitors. "Don't step there, stay on the rocks. That's my garden."
Here is how he describes life in this garden in my 1992 book of interviews with him, Is It Painful to Think? Conversations with Arne Naess (University of Minnesota Press):

AN: If a flower in a botany text is described as being from ten to thirty centimeters tall, you might find the same flower here at Tvergastein, elevation six thousand feet, and it's only five centimeters tall, or even less. But the flower is complete. In a dry summertime like this one you have this Arctic gentian and it's only one centimeter high, but still a fantastic flower.... I have sat here in the eight-meter square garden and just tried to count all the thousands of plants that blossom there. The task is endless, and there is no need to wish to finish it.

DR: A microcosm of the country.



AN: That should be quite clear. There is a kind of equal status of organisms at extremely different levels of devleopment. You get to appreciate this one small ecosystem, and you see youself as part of this ecosystem. I found a kind of rational basis for this feeling of belonging to this rich world of animals and plants and rocks. Humans do not depend on nature by minding it, trying to dominate more and more and be less dependent; you see the dependende as a plus, because it means an interrelation, whereby you yourself get to be tremendously greater, reaching from macroworld to microworld and back again. Feeling extremely small in the dimensions of the cosmos, you yourself get somehow widened and deeper, and you accept with joy this thing that others might perceive as a duty: to take care of the planet....


Book - Is It Painful to Think? Conversations with Arne Naess, by David Rothenberg.AN: Get rid of that dualism! The term 'environmentalism' is meaningless because it implies a very artificial kind of cleavage between humans and everything else. From our individual selves we look out toward the Self of the world.


In this tiny garden in the wilderness we have a clear image of how to break down the conceptual duality between humanity and the more-than-human world. Care for the nature in your midst and you will endeavor to live in a way that does not damage your own place in the scheme of things. Deep ecology is not the search for the pure, empty wildness far from your home. It's knowing how to tend the grounds of your home place, to trust the land that holds you up, to learn all the beings that share your place, and honestly find the right way to live.


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