The Foundation for Deep Ecology’s mission statement asserts that the organization’s purpose is “to support education, advocacy, and legal action on behalf of wild Nature and in opposition to the technologies and developments that are destroying the natural world.” “[T]rue ecological sustainability may require a rethinking of our values as a society,” adds FDE. “Present assumptions about economics, development, and the place of human beings in the natural order must be reevaluated. If we are to achieve ecological sustainability, Nature can no longer be viewed only for its commodity value; it must be seen as a partner and model in all human enterprise.”
The term “deep ecology” was coined in 1972 by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess, who rejected the idea that humans were more valuable than other species, or had an inherent right to alter the environment – whether by killing animals, cutting trees, constructing roads and bridges, or building dams. According to Naess, “The right of all forms [of life] to live is a universal right which cannot be quantified.” Deep ecology has been influenced by the traditions of Taoism and Zen Buddhism. Writes Naess, "The arrogance of stewardship [as found in the Bible] consists in the idea of superiority which underlies the thought that we exist to watch over nature like a highly respected middleman between the Creator and Creation.”
According to the website ActivistCash, “The ‘Deep Ecology Platform,’ as the movement’s credo is called, emphasizes the relative worthlessness of human life, rating it as no more important than that of plants or animals. The Platform considers human beings as a mere ‘interference’ with nature, and openly aims for a ‘decrease of the human population.’ It wraps up with a call to action, suggesting that people need to abandon the idea of ‘adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living,’ and instead should pursue ‘changes in policies’ that affect ‘basic economic [and] technological structures.’”
FDE grants money to activists who fight, both non-violently and sometimes violently, for what they see as the protection of species and ecosystems. The Foundation also sponsors conferences to teach eco-activists the best methods to prevent logging, mining, and industrialization from taking place on any lands they wish to protect. Its website lionizes the "ecosophies" of aboriginal and indigenous pre-industrial peoples and urges Westerners to emulate the values and lifestyles of such cultures.
FDE was created in 1989 by Douglas Tompkins, the founder of the Esprit and North Face clothing companies, who now lives with his wife in a secluded Chilean nature preserve. My "environmentalism," explains Tompkins, “was an outgrowth of my involvement in the anti-war/civil rights movement of the 1960s and the so-called greening of America movement that became intertwined with those social movements. . . .”
Jerry Mander, one of the Foundation's program directors, is a radical activist with a convoluted history of involvement in the environmentalist movement. He is the former president of Freeman, Mander, & Gossage, a San Francisco advertising agency that mentored the editors of Ramparts, the largest radical magazine of the 1960s. He managed numerous Sierra Club campaigns, among which was one aimed at preventing the building of dams in the Grand Canyon, and another aimed at stopping the U.S. Supersonic Transport (SST) airliner project.
Notwithstanding FDE’s passionately anti-corporate perspective, the organization’s financial portfolio contains stocks or bonds of numerous large corporations, including Allstate, which insures fossil-fuel-using automobiles; Citicorp and three foreign banks which fund the very globalization that Tompkins professes to abhor; Fannie Mae, a major funder of suburbanization; Grupo Televisa, the Mexican TV network; Hospital Corporation of America; Telefonos de Mexico; Wal-Mart.
In order to better protect the environment from human exploitation, FDE advocates population control. Toward this end, FDE partners with Planned Parenthood in conferences emphasizing the use of contraception and women's "reproductive right" to unrestricted, taxpayer-funded abortion-on-demand.
FDE earmarks considerable funds each year to in-house book projects – including production, publicity, promotion and distribution – dealing with environmental issues, especially in the area of environmental ethics and philosophy. It also supports authors, magazines, journals, radio series, and advertising campaigns covering issues it deems critical.
FDE identifies several spinoff and associated organizations with which it works very closely. These include:
a) The Conservation Land Trust (CLT), funded primarily by Doug and Kris Tompkins, was established in 1993 “to acquire wildlands for conservation in Chile and Argentina, both directly and through grant assistance to other stewarding organizations.” To date, CLT has acquired nearly two million acres of wildlands and helped in securing some 250,000 additional acres through other organizations. CLT’s modus operandi is similar to that of the Nature Conservancy, Trust for Public Land, and the Conservation Fund – acquiring specific parcels of land and thereafter thwarting any development efforts or logging projectson the land. In 2002, FDE itself launched a major program initiative to increase emphasis on this type of land acquisition in South America as a form of wildlands conservation.
(b) The Wildlands Project, established at a November 1991 FDE-hosted meeting in San Francisco, is devoted to “restoring the native biodiversity of North America and ‘rewilding’ endangered landscapes from Canada to Central America.” Working from the premise that existing protected areas are too small and too fragmented to sustain healthy ecosystems and wide-ranging animals, the Wildlands Project seeks to stitch together an interconnected system of large core reserves that can sustain roaming animals and plants, linked by corridors and surrounded by buffer zones.
(c) The International Forum on Globalization (IFG) helped organize the massive 1999 anti-globalization, anti-World Trade Organization protests in Seattle and Washington, DC. The Foundation for Deep Ecology originally conceived, housed, and funded the IFG, which has since become an independent nonprofit.
(d) The International Forum on Food and Agriculture (IFA) similarly opposes globalization, stating: “One of the more tragic consequences of economic globalization has been its effects on agriculture: farms, farm livelihoods, the quality and availability of food, as well as on the soil, air, water and public health. . . . Most of the world's people still live on the land, but because of globalization, they are now being forced to give way to multinational corporations. So, where we once had small farmers growing diverse food crops to sustain local communities, we now have giant global agribusinesses, growing monocultures of luxury products like cotton, beef, potted plants, and exotic vegetables to export to already wealthy markets. Small farmers and laborers are being replaced by machines and pesticides.”
