Dolores LaChapelle

Dolores LaChapelle's father was of Cherokee descent. Dolores graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Denver University in 1947. She now lives in Silverton, Colorado, where she teaches Tai Chi, writes, climbs mountains, skis, and directs the Way of Mountain Learning Center. Her books include Earth Festivals, Earth Wisdom, and Sacred Land, Sacred Sex: Rapture of the Deep.

You can't talk about deep ecology without talking about the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. Talking on the Water, 1994.

 

It's easy to see why many academics and intellectuals have such a difficult time with deep ecology. If it can't be defined within the narrow Eurocentric tradition then it simply doesn't exist. Ibid.

 

. . . deep ecology is not antihuman. It's larger than the human. It includes humans within the whole of life, not setting them apart from life or above life. Ibid.

 

We still have the sophisticated body and highly trained complex brain of the hunter, yet in the last four hundred years we've been trying to force this body/brain into the tight, dull, limited, violent view of modern industrial culture. Ibid.

 

When you start seeing the world as patterns . . . everything opens up. Ibid.