Arne Næss
Norwegian philosopher and mountain climber (1912-2009) · Norway · On the map · Academics · Died at 96
He gave the environmental movement a philosophy. Arne Næss coined "deep ecology" in the 1970s - the idea that nature has intrinsic value beyond human use, that every living thing matters in the web, and that the crisis runs deeper than policy fixes. Rachel Carson lit the fuse; he built the framework.
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Born in Oslo in 1912, Næss spent decades as a philosopher before the environmental question found him. Carson's Silent Spring in 1962 shifted his lens. He began arguing that postwar green groups had raised alarm but missed the root - unexamined assumptions inside western culture that treated nature as resource. He split ecological thinking into "deep" and "shallow": the latter pragmatic and human-centered, the former insisting on the inherent worth of all life and the tangled dependencies that hold ecosystems together. He drew on Gandhi, joined direct actions, wrote prolifically across philosophy until his death in 2009. The term he coined became a cornerstone of how a generation thought about the planet.
