Philosophy
Deep ecology asks us to value nature beyond human use, but ecofeminism pushes the question further: who has already paid the price for that human-centred world?
Deep Ecology, Ecofeminism, and the Dialectic of Belonging
Deep ecology, as articulated by Arne Næss and later developed by Bill Devall and George Sessions, makes a philosophical move that is both radical and necessary: it insists on the intrinsic value of all living beings, challenging the anthropocentric assumption that nature exists as a resource for human purposes. To say that a river has value independent of its usefulness to us, that a forest matters beyond its timber yield, is to rupture something foundational in modern Western thought. This rupture is real, and it matters. But deep ecology’s universalism is a call for humanity to recognise its embeddedness in nature and invites a question rather than a refutation: which humanity? The Adivasi farmer in Chhattisgarh, the Dalit agricultural labourer in Telangana, the fishing community in Kerala’s backwaters and their relationship to the natural world have already been shaped by centuries of dispossession, caste exclusion, and colonial land policy. They did not need philosophy to tell them they belong to the earth. The forest was never an abstraction for them; it was a livelihood, a pharmacy, a spiritual home, and a site of ongoing political struggle. Deep ecology’s invitation to return to nature assumes a distance from nature that not everyone has been permitted or indeed forced to occupy.
This is where Anthropocene ecofeminism enters not as a correction but as a deepening. Thinkers like Maria Mies, Ariel Salleh, and Vandana Shiva argue that the domination of nature and the domination of women and marginalised communities are not parallel crises to be addressed separately; they are the same crisis, produced by the same logic of control, commodification, and extraction. Industrial capitalism’s war on the earth is inseparable from its war on subsistence economies, on care labour, on the kinds of knowledge that cannot be measured in GDP. Ecofeminism takes deep ecology’s insight about intrinsic value and asks: if we are serious about this, we must also account for the humans who have been most forcibly identified with nature, that is, women, the colonised, the landless, the caste-oppressed and who have borne the deepest cost of its destruction. The dialectic is generative: deep ecology opens the philosophical horizon by decentring the human; ecofeminism insists that decentring the human must not become a way of evading the question of which humans have been made most expendable within the existing order. Neither position is complete without the other.
Together, deep ecology and ecofeminism produce something closer to an ecological ethics adequate to the world as it actually is unequal, colonial, caste-stratified, and nevertheless alive with the possibility of other relationships.
Translated into the AI context, this dialectic becomes clarifying in a specific way. The question is not simply whether AI harms the environment. In the abstract, it is who bears those harms, whose knowledge is absorbed without return, whose landscapes become sacrifice zones so that others may have seamless digital experiences. The low-wage labour of content moderators in the Philippines and Kenya, who train AI systems by viewing traumatic content for hours each day. The communities living near lithium extraction sites in the Andean altiplano, whose water sources are depleted by mining operations. The forest dwellers whose land rights are overridden in the name of green energy infrastructure. These are not separate problems requiring separate solutions. They are one problem with many faces, and deep ecology, sharpened by ecofeminism’s insistence on power and history, gives us a vocabulary adequate to naming it.