ABSTRACT
The recipient of prestigious honours, in Sweden as well as Norway, Arne Naess remained, in his eighties and nineties, an instantly recognizable and admired figure in his country's intellectual life and in radical environmentalist circles all over the world. By the early 1970s, Naess was already reflecting on the relevance to environmental issues of the views of Gandhi and other thinkers outside the orthodox Western traditions of science and philosophy. Naess characterized the shallow movement as primarily engaged in a 'fight against pollution and resource depletion', its 'central objective' being 'the health and affluence of people in the developed countries'. On a broader front, Naess's legacy to the deep ecological tendency in contemporary environmental thought and activism is not simply the name of that tendency. As its most distinguished spokesman among professional philosophers, Naess provided it with a theoretical foundation at which earlier writers of similar sympathies, such as Aldo Leopold, only hinted.
