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Thinkers

Arne Naess

Environmental · Europe · 1912 to 2009

Norwegian philosopher who held that all living things have value in themselves, and who coined the term deep ecology.

What it is

Arne Næss (1912 to 2009) was a Norwegian philosopher who coined the term deep ecology. He argued that living things have value in themselves, not only for what they give to people, and that the environmental crisis points to something wrong in the way modern societies see themselves.

He was born in Slemdal, now part of Oslo, and at the age of 27 became the youngest professor at the University of Oslo. He was also a keen mountaineer and an activist, and he lived to be 96.

The main ideas

  • Shallow and deep. He separated two ways of thinking about ecology. The shallow way holds that the big ecological problems can be resolved within the industrial society we already have. The deep way asks deeper questions, and holds that society itself has caused the ecological crisis.
  • Value in itself. Living things, he held, have a value of their own that does not depend on being useful to us. He spoke of a right of living beings to live and to flourish.
  • Self-realization. He argued that people come into their own by seeing themselves as part of the wider living world, not as separate from it.
  • Ecosophy. He called his own worked-out philosophy ecosophy T. The T stands for Tvergastein, the mountain hut where he lived and wrote.
  • Influences. His ideas drew on the teachings of Gandhi, and his activism was inspired in part by Rachel Carson's book Silent Spring.

What it looks like in practice

Imagine someone deciding whether to support a plan to dam a river for power. A shallow way of thinking weighs the electricity against the cost to the fish and the scenery. A deep way of thinking also asks why the river was only ever counted as a resource. This is an illustration of the idea, not an example from his writing.

Books and moments

  • The term deep ecology. He coined it, and it became a name used across the environmental movement.
  • 1950. He led the first ascent of Tirich Mir, a mountain of 7,708 metres in Pakistan.
  • 1970. With many other protesters he chained himself to rocks in front of the Mardalsfossen waterfall in Norway and refused to move until plans for a dam were dropped.
  • Later life. He took part in politics as a candidate for the Green party.

Questions and criticism

  • Do all living things count the same? One account says he held that every being has an equal right to live and flourish. In an obituary he is quoted as saying to have said that every living being has an intrinsic value that is not quantifiable, neither equal nor unequal. How these fit together is a matter of argument.
  • How far does the idea go in practice? If nature has value in itself, readers can ask how to choose when human needs and the needs of other living things collide.
  • Is value in itself provable? Saying that a river or a forest has worth apart from any person raises the question of how such a claim could be tested or argued for.

Close neighbours

The page on Aldo Leopold covers an earlier writer who asked people to see themselves as members of a community that includes land and animals. The page on Gandhi covers a thinker whose teachings Næss drew on.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced by

  • Aldo Leopold · Later writers on deep ecology looked back to his land ethic. (scholars disagree about this link)
  • Baruch Spinoza · He drew on Spinoza's view of all things as parts of one whole.
  • Mohandas Gandhi · He took from Gandhi the practice of non-violent protest and a respect for all life.

Other Environmental thinkers

Sources we used

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