PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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compatible with the Gaia hypothesis, which also presents an all-encompassing outlook on
life as one interconnected whole. 49
The Institute for Deep Ecology is a useful example of an organization that has
attempted to translate such an ecocentric, low-impact approach to human life into
guidelines for daily decision-making (see www.deep-ecology.org/ide_values.html):
We humbly acknowledge our place in the web of life that sustains us. … We commit
ourselves to living more lightly and less violently on Earth in the energy and natural
resources we consume. … Our intention is to reduce, re-use, recycle,…. participate in
or contribute to an ecological restoration activity, … seek affiliations and collaborative
projects as a means to reduce consumption and increase effectiveness, select locations
and plan for programs in ways that minimize travel, especially the solo use of
automobiles, and increase the use of sustainable, local products. [emphasis added]
Traditional conservationist movements aimed at wilderness and wildlife
protection are of course also complementary to the Deep Ecology project. The basic
“protect nature for nature’s sake” argument is an implied, albeit now largely unstated
feature of most current environmental activism.
Most large environmental organizations active in the European Union and in the
accession countries are much less radical in their formulations than the Deep Ecology
platform. The following goal statements of some of the most influential NGOs active in
Europe illustrate how conservation and biodiversity issues are now typically framed
within a larger agenda of environmental and civic activism. Euronatur and BirdLife
49 The Gaia Hypothesis, championed by the British chemist James Lovelock, views the planet as a giant
self-regulating organism (Lovelock 1979; Lovelock 1988). For Lovelock (1988:206, 212) “Gaia is a
religious as well as a scientific concept” meaning that “God and Gaia, theology and science, even physics
and biology are not separate but a single way of thought.” The fact that it has been widely adopted as a
New Age tenet certainly has not helped the credibility of Lovelock’s hypothesis. Nevertheless, the general
concept of biotic regulation of the Earth has recently found some respectability among the biogeochemical
community (Kaiser 2000).