ABOUT US

This song of the waters is audible to every ear , but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. On a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it – a vast pulsing harmony – its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.

    Aldo Leopold
   

After long discussions around campfires for many years, at action camps, during tree sits… A group of like minded people, with a collective belief in the Tenants of Deep Ecology and a foundation in Earth-Centered Spirituality, came together as a congregation to form the Church of Deep Ecology. We were officially recognized by the the US government as the Church of Deep Ecology on Beltane/May Day 2018

Deep Ecology is the belief that all life has a right to exist, That no one species is more important that another. Nature does not exist to service humans. Rather, Humans are a part of nature, one species among many.

We believe Biodiversity is essential for the continued existence of the living Earth. As part of this biodiversity, humans must learn to lie within nature, according to natures law, and learn to accept our role as one among many.

We believe that stopping global climate change, environmental devastation and achieving true sustainability will require a complete rethinking of our values as a species.  Nature can no longer be viewed  as a commodity—a storehouse of “resources” for human use and profit.

We start with the understanding that life on Earth is on a tipping point  . We speak of threats not only to human life, but to the lives of all species of plants and animals, of the entire ecosphere in all its beauty and complexity including the natural processes that create and shape life’s diversity. It is the growing threats to the health of the ecosphere that motivates us

We believe that current problems are largely rooted in the following,

• The loss of traditional knowledge, values, and ethics of behavior that celebrate the intrinsic value and sacredness of the natural world and that give the preservation of Nature prime importance.  The assumption of human superiority  to other life forms, as if we were granted royalty status over Nature; the idea that Nature is mainly here to serve human will and purpose.

• The prevailing economic and development paradigms of the modern world, which place primary importance on the values of the imaginary currency and wealth, not on Nature. The conversion of Nature to commodity, the emphasis upon economic growth , the industrialization of all activity, from forestry to farming to the very “management” of species, even to education and culture; the rush to economic globalization, cultural homogenization, commodity accumulation, urbanization, and human isolation . All of these are fundamentally incompatible with ecological sustainability on a finite Earth.

• Technology worship and an unlimited faith in the virtues of science; the modern belief  that technological development is inevitable, invariably good, and to be equated with progress and human destiny. From this, we are left dangerously uncritical, blind to profound problems that technology has wrought, and in a state of passivity that confounds democracy.

• Overpopulation, in both the overdeveloped and the underdeveloped worlds, placing unsustainable burdens upon biodiversity and the human condition.

As our name suggests, we are influenced by the Deep Ecology Platform, which helps guide and inform our work. We embrace Deep Ecology because it gets back to our roots.  Not our roots as humans living in a modern society, but as members of something much larger. We believe that values other than market values must be recognized and given importance, and that Nature provides the ultimate measure by which to judge human endeavors. We embrace Deep Ecology as a path to a more nature-based life rather than the greed-based society we have come to know.