ABSTRACT
William Grey sets out to criticize deep ecology by first presenting his version of how deep ecology diagnoses the environmental illness of industrial society. The picture he presents is a caricature drawn from the work of a number of contemporary authors, my own included, not all of whom claim to be followers of deep ecology. Grey characterizes how followers of deep ecology diagnose the origins of our current environmental illness in the following manner. He claims that deep ecologists find the roots of our environmental problems in a shallow technocratic philosophy which has its deeper taproot in the subsoil of Cartesianism and Christianity. Deep ecology is a philosophical activity, an inquiry, and also a social movement that aims to reopen the conversation with nature and between communities of beings that has been largely interrupted by certain developments in modern industrial society.
