Like many recent arrivals to the Golden State, Bill Devall was on a spiritual journey but had not yet reached his destination. Having cast off old beliefs, he needed a new philosophy. And this day he found what he was searching for, an idea so mind blowing it would change the world!

After graduating from the University of Kansas and enrolling in the Ph.D. program at the University of Oregon, Devall joined the faculty at Humboldt State at Arcata, California, in 1968, while completing his dissertation on the governance of the Sierra Club. But his sociologist colleagues didn't give a fig for the environment. So he designed a specialty form himself, calling it political ecology.

When he arrived, Devall found the campus in turmoil over Redwoods National Park. The Sierra Club, students felt, had caved in to political pressure, accepting a park that was too small. "That experience taught me," Devall said, "that conventional politics of give and take practiced by Sierra was self-defeating. The club didn't listen to the grassroots. The drama of David Brower's firing happened before my eyes. It seemed to symbolize the contrast between establishment environmentalism and the no-compromise approach."

So Devall sought an alternative ideology, an intellectual compass that would give direction to his dissatisfaction. Then, as he was walking through the college library one day in 1975, he recalled, "this article sort of fell into my lap." The article, from the obscure Norwegian journal Inquiry, was the translation of a 1973 address delivered by a Norwegian philosopher, Arne Naess, at the Third World Future Research Conference in Budapest a year earlier. The paper was titled "The Shallow and the Deep: Long-Range Ecology Movements."

There were, Naess said, two kinds of environmentalism. Shallow environmentalism was the parochial movement practiced by mainstream conservationist groups. Single issue-oriented, it pursued politics as usual, placed man at the center of the universe, and aimed at protecting "the health and affluence of people in developed countries."

Deep ecology, by contrast, proposed a basic realignment of the relations between people and nature. Combining ecology and philosophy into what Naess called "ecosophy" – the "philosophy of ecological harmony or equilibrium" – it applied ecology to all problems. Based on the insight that everything is interdependent, it sought to sustain balance in ecosystems, since these, and not their individual members, are the fundamental units of nature. This aim in turn demanded what Naess called "biospherical egalitarianism...the equal right (of all things) to live and blossom." Since living creatures depend on one another, all life is equally important. All things are created equal!

With deep ecology, ecosystem science had come home to roost. The concept of the organic community, which originated centuries ago as philosophic monism, and which was inserted into biology by Haeckel, Clements, Tansley, and the Odums, had become a philosophic doctrine once again. A new generation, borrowing the ecosystem metaphor from science, would put it to political uses no one anticipated.

This was a sledgehammer of an idea with which to change the world. For Devall, things suddenly fell into place. He would be the apostle of deep ecology! The next year he introduced the idea to America in a half-page article written for the tiny journal Econews, then followed it with a piece for the Humboldt Journal of Social Relations called "Streams of Environmentalism: Reform vs. Deep Ecology." Soon he teamed with the philosopher George Sessions of Sierra College, near Sacramento, churning out tracts to sell the idea. And it spread like lightning...

By appealing to nature, Devall evinced a classical response in his search for political values. Just as Plato appealed to nature to justify benevolent despotism, Aristotle to champion Athenian democracy, Hobbes to argue for absolute monarch, and Locke to defend liberalism, so Devall invoked nature to justify the principle of biocentric equality. Yet, however attractive, his idea was no less arbitrary than those advocated by earlier political philosophers. Nature was not necessarily "egalitarian." It could just as easily be characterized as a hierarchy, as Aldo Leopold described it in Sand County Almanac, as a "biotic pyramid." Though all things are mutually dependent, they are also predatory. Wolves eat elk, which consume grass. A hierarchical metaphor of nature seemed more likely to justify human domination.

The notion of the individual as a subordinate member of an indivisible organic community of interdependent parts – the idea on which biospherical egalitarianism rested – was not so much an insight of empirical biology as of German metaphysics. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, teaching at the University of Berlin in the early nineteenth century, developed the doctrine to justify the restoration of the Prussian monarchy following the Napoleonic wars. Known as the "organic theory of the state," Hegel's philosophy asserted that the Prussians were connected to one another by tradition, language, and folklore. This was the national spirit of which the state was a manifestation.

Hegel was both a monist and a holist, who, like Devall, applied his ideas to politics. Everything in the universe, Hegel believed, is composed of spiritual substance; only complex wholes, and not their parts, have independent reality. Likewise, people are merely elements in a larger system which is the state, and have no status apart from the state. The "highest duty" of the individual, Hegel wrote, "is to be a member of the state."

As the philosopher Walter Stace explains, for Hegel "the state is a true individual. It is a person, an organism (in which) the life of the whole appears in all the parts. This means that the true life of the parts, i.e., the individuals, is found in and is identical with the life of the whole, the state." Hence, Hegel opposed liberalism and individualism. "Liberalism sets up, in opposition to (Prussian holism), the atomistic principle which insists upon the sway of individual wills." This "makes it impossible to firmly establish any political organization."

To be sure, by early nineteenth-century standards Hegel was a highly principled, ethical thinker. His was intended as a moral holism, and the Prussian state he advocated was not totalitarian but benevolent. Nevertheless, his supposition that individuals are subordinate to higher values inspired both fascism (an amoral spiritual monism) and communism (a materialistic monism).

"The Fascist conception," wrote Mussolini, "is for the individual insofar as he coincides with the State...Fascism reaffirms the state as the true reality of the individual." To liberals, wrote Mussolini's minister of justice, Alfredo Rocco, in 1925, echoing Hegel,

Hegel, wrote Karl Marx's collaborator, Friedrich Engels, "was the most encyclopedic mind of his time." Indeed, Hegel's philosophy – complex, obscure, thorough, fascinating, and subtle – dominated European politics and scholarship for nearly a century. His monism was a fecund idea with prolific implications which opened up entirely new horizons for scholarship. Just one of his seminal insights – that things can be understood only within a larger context – not only prompted Marx to argue that individuals are subordinate to the social class to which they belong, but also gave birth to the science of sociology (i.e., studying people within the greater social setting).

In 1866 Ernst Haeckel, embracing holism and monism, conceived the idea of studying things within the context of their environment, which at first he believed was entirely material but later apparently came to see as infused with spirit. Individuals, Haeckel argued, following Hegel, do not have a separate existence; they are merely parts of the larger wholes – the tribe, the nation, the environment.

Haeckel was not merely a scientist. An ardent German nationalist, he was also a Darwinian and – like several Save the Redwoods League founders – a believer in Eugenics. But, unlike the American conservationists, he promoted racism as a social policy, actually advocating preservation of the biological purity of the German people through euthanasia and careful breeding. As the historian Daniel Gasman has noted: "Disaster was on the horizon, he (Haeckel) preached, unless Germany acted radically and forcefully to bring itself into harmony with the laws of biology...What was needed for Germany...was a far reaching cultural and not a social revolution...The monists were, therefore, true practitioners of conservative religion."

Nature was both a source of truth and a value worthy of worship. But the German people were cut off from nature. To reestablish this connection, said Haeckel, the state must mimic the organic structure of the environment. This reasoning led Haeckel to reject humanism and to found a political movement, the Monist League, to promote his ideology. If living things are interconnected parts of organic nature, the Monists reasoned, then differences between humans and other creatures are matters of degree, not kind. And since people derived their identity through their race – whose interests were represented by the state – then the state was the highest authority, and liberal concepts of freedom and justice were invalid. Liberalism was an enemy of the state, and of race.

In short, ecology, like Darwinism, was adapted for political uses almost from the start. Its prominence by the 1920s prompts the Oxford historian Anna Bramwell to ask if it should be called "a German disease." Haeckel's ideas that humans should be close to nature and that his countrymen must revive "the German spirit" helped to fuel the "Volkish" movement – an effort to reestablish people's connection with nature by reviving early Celtic rural conditions. Nationalists and agrarians believed, according to Bramwell, that "Germans had been victims of forcible denaturalization from the days of the Roman Empire. The alien Christian Judaic civilization had blocked man off from the natural world, and all the anti-life manifestations of urban living stemmed from this false ethic."

Hence, they believe that preserving society required the reestablishment of connections with nature by reviving the primitive agrarian culture, or Volk, and ridding Germany of everything – and everybody – that was unnatural. Society must promote biological fitness through "racial hygiene" and euthanasia.

The desire to subordinate people to organic nature led directly to racism. "The 'scientific' element of racialism can be traced back to Haeckel," writes the philosopher Karl Popper. Haeckel, as Robert Jay Lifton observes, in part quoting the historian George L. Mosse, "a towering figure in German biology and an early Darwinian, was also a racist, a believer in a mystical Volk, and a strong advocate of eugenics who 'can be claimed to be a direct ancestor' of the Nazi 'euthanasia' project." Indeed, as Daniel Gasman calls "Germany's major prophet of political biology," someone who contributed significantly to the development of Nazi ideology: "The writings of Haeckel and the ideas of his followers...were proto-Nazi in character, and (as) one of the most powerful forces in the nineteenth and twentieth-century German intellectual history, may be fully understood as a prelude to the doctrine of National Socialism."

"We do not need to strain at gnats to show there was a strain of ecological ideas among Nazis: the evidence is ample," writes Bramwell. As the historian Robert A. Pois observes, National Socialism was "a religion of nature," which called for the establishment of a utopian community, the Volksgemeinschaft, rooted in a perceived natural order." Throughout Hitler's political career, writes Pois, "he would continually emphasize the importance of recognizing nature's power over man. He scoffed at the notion of humans ever having the ability to 'control' or 'rule over' nature...Hitler sounded remarkably like contemporary environmentalists who, with ample reason, proclaim that a sharp-tempered Mother Nature... will eventually avenge herself upon those who, at least since the onset of industrialization, have tried her patience." He believed in "the sanctity of nature."

Indeed, Nazism was based largely on biological theory. As Hitler's confidant Rudolph Hess insisted, the movement was nothing more than "applied biology" for restoring the "vitality of the German race." It sought "biological renewal" through building, said Heinrich Himmler's legal aide, Werner Best, an "organically indivisible national community." And those who opposed these goals merely revealed themselves to be "the symptom of an illness which threatens the healthy unity of the...national organism."

Decrying man's alienation from nature, many Nazi thinkers – among whom can be counted the philosopher Martin Heidegger – opposed what they saw as unnatural and decadent modern living. Heidegger complained that "technological domination spreads itself over the earth ever more quickly, ruthlessly, and completely...The humanness of man and the thingness of things dissolve into the calculated market value of a market which...spans the earth." Likewise, the Nazis blamed capitalists for driving farmers off the land and into towns in an effort to obtain cheap labor, thus undermining rural culture and promoting factory farms that used poisonous synthetic chemicals. Reestablishing the connection with nature, they believed, required crushing unnatural, non-German values. Private property had to be abolished, since it promoted commercialism, consumerism, and urbanization. Forests and wildlife, symbolizing Germany's pre-Roman past, had to be preserved.

Therefore, soon after seizing power in 1933, the Third Reich launched a ruralization program to create a new more, primitive Germany. Subdivisions and private property were declared illegal. Vivisection was banned, and Hitler's Germany became the first European country to establish nature preserves. In 1940 hedgerow and copse protection ordinances were passed "to protect the habitat of wildlife."

"SS training," reports Bramwell, "included a respect for animal life of near Buddhist proportions." Meanwhile, the Nazi regime embraced organic agriculture. Hess promoted experimentation in "bio-dynamic farming," including tests that featured feeding babies organically grown food. Himmler, who, like Hitler, was a vegetarian, created several organic farms, including one at Dachau which produced herbs for SS medicines. His staff, reports Bramwell, "sent him papers on B vitamin shortages as a cause of matriarchal societies," and other "studies were made on the degenerative effect of artificial fertilizer."

How was the enemy to be defined? Politics was reduced to a civil war in which two opposing forces, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, were in conflict, and the former had to exterminate the latter by any means necessary. The enemy was no longer the ancien regime, the aristocrats, the bourgeoisie, and the military officers, but anyone opposed to Bolshevik policy. Those who expressed opposition were immediately designated "bourgeois" and treated accordingly. To the Bolshevik mind, an "enemy" was anyone, regardless of social category, who presented an obstacle to the Bolshevik's absolute power. This phenomenon appeared immediately, even earlier than terror, in the electoral assemblies of the Soviets. Kautsky foresaw this development when he wrote in 1918 that the only people allowed to elect deputies to the Soviets were to be those

The word "proletarian" played the same role here that the term "patriot" had for Robespierre. "Enemy" was also a totally elastic category that expanded or contracted to meet the political needs of the moment, becoming a key element in Communist thought and practice. As Tzvetan Todorov put it,

One essential question remains: Why should the enemy be exterminated? The traditional role of repression, in Foucault's terminology, is to "discipline and punish." Was the time of discipline and punishment over? Had class enemies become "unredeemable"? Solzhenitsyn provides one response by showing that in the Gulag common criminals were systematically treated better than political prisoners. This was the case not solely for practical reasons – that they helped run the camps – but also for theoretical reasons. One of the aims of the Soviet regime was to build new men, and doing this implied reeducation of the most hardened criminals. It was also a key propaganda issue in the Soviet Union under Stalin, as well as in China under Mao and in Cuba under Castro.

But why should the enemy be killed? The identification of enemies has always played an important role in politics. Even the gospel says: "He who is not with me is against me." What was new was Lenin's insistence not only that those not with him were against him, but also those who were against him were to die. Furthermore, he extended this principle outside the domain of politics into the wider sphere of society as a whole.

Terror involves a double mutation. The adversary is first labeled an enemy, and then declared a criminal, which leads to his exclusion from society. Exclusion very quickly turns into extermination. The friend/foe dialectic no longer suffices to solve the fundamental problem of totalitarianism: the search for a reunified humanity that is purified and no longer antagonistic, conducted through messianic dimension of the Marxist project to reunify humanity via the proletariat. The ideal is to prop up a forcible unification – of the Party, of society, of the entire empire – and to weed out anyone who fails to fit into the new world. After a relatively short period, society passes from the logic of political struggle to the process of exclusion, then to the ideology of elimination, and finally to the extermination of impure elements. At the end of the line, there are crimes against humanity.

The leaders of totalitarian regimes saw themselves as the moral guardians of society and were proud of their right to send anyone they chose to his death. The fundamental justification was always the same: necessity with a scientific basis. Tzvetan Todorov, reflecting on the origins of totalitarianism, writes: "It was scientism and not humanism that helped establish the ideological bases of totalitarianism...The relation between scientism and totalitarianism is not limited to the justification of acts through so-called scientific necessity (biological or historical): one must already be a practitioner of scientism, even if it is 'wild' scientism, to believe in the perfect transparency of society and thus in the possibility of transforming society by revolutionary means to conform with an ideal."

Trotsky provided a clear illustration of this "scientific" approach in 1919. In his Defense of Terrorism he claimed: "The violent revolution has become a necessity because the imminent requirements of history are unable to find a road through the apparatus of parliamentary democracy." In support of this claim he advanced "proofs":

Putting people to death required a certain amount of study. Relatively few people actively desire the death of their fellow human beings, so a method of facilitating this had to be found. The most effective means was the denial of the victim's humanity through a process of dehumanization. As Alain Brossat notes: "The barbarian ritual of purge, and the idea of the extermination machine in top gear are closely linked in the discourse and practice of persecution to the animalization of the Other, to the reduction of real or imaginary enemies to a zoological state."

There were many examples of this process. During the great trials in Moscow, the procurator Andrei Vyshinsky, who was an intellectual with a traditional classical training, threw himself into a veritable frenzy of animalization:

Brossat draws the following conclusions from this process of animalization:

One thing is certain: Crimes against humanity are the product of an ideology that reduces people not to a universal but to a particular condition, be it biological, racial, or sociohistorical. By means of propaganda, the Communists succeeded in making people believe that their conduct had universal implications, relevant to humanity as a whole. Critics have often tried to make a distinction between Nazism and Communism by arguing that the Nazi project had a particular aim, which was nationalist and racist in extreme, whereas Lenin's project was universal. This is entirely wrong. In both theory and practice, Lenin and his successors excluded from humanity all capitalists, the bourgeoisie, counterrevolutionaries, and others, turning them into absolute enemies in their sociological and political discourse. Kautsky noted as early as 1918 that these terms were entirely elastic, allowing those in power to exclude whomever they wanted from humanity whenever they so wished. These were the terms that led directly to crimes against humanity.

...the green movement is the old red movement, deprived of its pretensions to rationality and seeking to evade its guilt by turning on reason itself, as though reason were responsible for the failure of socialism and for all horrors that have been committed as a result of socialism. The green movement, in other words, is the red movement stripped of the veneer of reason and science rather than take the trouble to learn what reason and science actually are. The green movement is the red movement no longer in its boisterous, arrogant youth, but its demented old age.

The only difference I can see between the green movement of the environmentalists and the old red movement of the Communists and socialists is the superficial one of the specific reasons for which they want to violate individual liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The Reds claimed that the individual could not be left free because the result would be such things as "exploitation," "monopoly," and depressions. The Greens claim that the individual cannot be left free because the result will be such things as the destruction of the ozone layer, acid rain, and global warming. Both claim that centralized government control over economic activity is essential. The Reds wanted it for the alleged sake of achieving human prosperity. The Greens want it for the alleged sake of avoiding environmental damage and for the actual, admitted purpose of inflicting human misery and death (which was also the actual, but unadmitted purpose for which the Reds wanted it). Both the Reds and the Greens want someone to suffer and die; the one, the capitalists and the rich, for the alleged sake of the wage earners and the poor; the other, a major portion of mankind, for the alleged sake of lower animals and inanimate nature.

Thus, it should not be surprising to see hordes of former Reds, or of those who otherwise would have become Reds, turning from Marxism and becoming Greens of the ecology movement. It is the same fundamental philosophy in a different guise, ready as ever to wage war on the freedom and well-being of the individual. In seeking to destroy capitalism and industrial civilization, both movements provide ample potential opportunity for those depraved individuals who would rather kill than live, who would rather inflict pain and death than experience pleasure, whose pleasure comes from the infliction of pain and death.

While every group has certain economic interests identical with those of all groups, every group has also, as we shall see, interests antagonistic to those of all groups. While certain public policies would in the long run benefit everybody, other policies would benefit one group at the expense of all other groups. The group that would benefit by such policies, having such a direct interest in them, will argue for them plausibly and persistently. It will hire the best buyable minds to devote their whole time to presenting its case. And it will finally either convince the general public that its case is sound, or so befuddle it that clear thinking on the subject becomes next to impossible.

In addition to these endless pleadings of self-interest, there is a second main factor that spawns economic fallacies every day. This is the persistent tendency of men to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups. It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences.

Already large numbers of otherwise good people have been enlisted in the environmentalists' campaign to throttle the production of energy. This is a campaign which, to the degree that it succeeds, can only cause human deprivation and the substitution of man's limited muscle power for the power of motors and engines. It is actually a campaign which seeks nothing less than the undoing of the Industrial Revolution, and the return to the poverty, filth, and misery of earlier centuries.

The essential feature of the Industrial Revolution is the use of man-made power. To the relatively feeble muscles of draft animals and the still more feeble muscles of human beings, and to the relatively small power available from nature in the form of wind and falling water, the Industrial Revolution added man-made power. It did so first in the form of steam generated from the combustion of coal, and later in the form of the internal combustion based on petroleum, and electric power based on the burning of any fossil fuel or on atomic energy.

This man-made power is the essential basis of all the economic improvements achieved over the last two hundred years. Its application is what enables us human beings to accomplish with our arms and hands the amazing productive results we do accomplish. To the feeble powers of our arms and hands is added the enormously greater power released by these sources of energy. Energy use, the productivity of labor, and the standard of living are inseparably connected, with the two last entirely dependent on the first.

Thus, it is not surprising, for example, that the United States enjoys the world's highest standard of living. This is a direct result of the fact that the United States has the world's highest energy consumption per capita. The United States, more than any other country, is the country where intelligent human beings have arranged motor-driven machinery to accomplish results for them. All further substantial increases in the productivity of labor and standard of living, both here in the United States and across the world, will be equally dependent on man-made power and the growing consumption of energy makes it possible. Our ability to accomplish more and more with the same limited muscular powers of our limbs will depend entirely on our ability to augment them further and further with the aid of still more such energy.

In total opposition to the Industrial Revolution and all the marvelous results it has accomplished, the essential goal of environmentalism is to block the increase in one source of man-made power after another and ultimately to roll back the production of man-made power to the point of virtual nonexistence, thereby undoing the Industrial Revolution and returning the world to the economic Dark Ages. There is to be no atomic power. According to environmentalists, it represents the death ray. There is to be now power based on fossil fuels. According to environmentalists, it causes "pollution," and now global warming, and must therefore be given up. There is not even to be significant hydro-power. According to environmentalists, the building of the necessary dams destroys the intrinsically valuable wildlife habitat.

Only three things are to be permitted as sources of energy, according to the environmentalists. Two of them, "solar power" and power from windmills, are, as far as can be seen, utterly impracticable as significant sources of energy. If somehow, they became practicable, the environmentalists would undoubtedly find grounds for attacking them. The third allowable source of energy, "conservation," is a contradiction in terms. "Conservation" is not a source of energy. Its actual meaning is simply using less. Conservation is a source of energy only at the price of deprivation of energy use somewhere else.

The environmentalists' campaign against energy calls to mind the image of a boa constrictor entwining itself about the body of its victim and slowly squeezing the life out of him. There can be no other result for the economic system of the industrialized world but enfeeblement and ultimately death if its supplies of energy are progressively choked off.

Last week the National Academy of Sciences released a report on climate change, prepared in response to a request from the White House, that was depicted in the press as an implicit endorsement of the Kyoto Protocol. CNN's Michelle Mitchell was typical of the coverage when she declared that the report represented "a unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse, and is due to man. There is no wiggle room."

As one of 11 scientists who prepared the report, I can state that this is simply untrue. For starters, the NAS never asks that all participants agree to all elements of a report, but rather that the report represent the span of views. This full report did, making clear that there is no consensus, unanimous or otherwise, about long-term climate trends and what causes them.

As usual, far too much public attention was paid to the hastily prepared summary rather than to the body of the report. The summary began with a zinger – that greenhouse gases are accumulating in the Earth's atmosphere as a result of human activities, causing surface air temperatures and subsurface ocean temperatures to rise, etc., before following with the necessary qualifications. For example, the full text noted that 20 years was too short a period for estimating long-term trends, but the summary forgot to mention this.

Our primary conclusion was that despite some knowledge and agreement, the science is by no means settled. We are quite confident (1) that global mean temperature is about 0.5 degrees Celsius higher than it was a century ago; (2) that atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have risen over the past two centuries; and (3) that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas whose increase is likely to warm the earth (one of many, most important being water vapor and clouds).

But – and I cannot stress this enough – we are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to carbon dioxide or to forecast what the climate will be in the future. That is to say, contrary to media impressions, agreement with the three basic statements tells us almost nothing relevant to policy discussions.

One reason for this uncertainty is that, as the report states, the climate is always changing; change is the norm. Two centuries ago, much of the Northern Hemisphere was emerging from a little ice age. A millennium ago, during the Middle Ages, the same region was in a warm period. Thirty years ago, we were concerned about global cooling.

Science, in the public arena, is commonly used as a source of authority with which to bludgeon political opponents and propagandize uninformed citizens. That is what has been done with both the reports of the IPCC and the NAS. It is a reprehensible practice that corrodes our ability to make rational decisions.

The American people must be made aware of what environmentalism actually stands for and of what they stand to lose, and have already lost, as the result of its growing influence. They must be made aware of the environmental movement's responsibility for the energy crisis and the accompanying high price of oil and oil products, which is the result of its systematic and highly successful campaign against additional energy supplies. They must be made aware of its consequent responsibility for the enrichment of Arab sheiks at the expense of the impoverishment of hundreds of millions of people around the world, including many millions here in the United States. They must be made aware of its responsibility for the vastly increased wealth, power, and influence of terrorist governments in the Middle East, stemming from the high price of oil it has caused, and for the resulting need to fight a war in the region.

Like it or not, the current world population exists. Destroying its material foundation in order to attain the 'ethical' or instinctually gratifying improvements advocated by socialists would be tantamount to condoning the death of billions and the impoverishment of the rest.