One of the great thinkers and philosophers of the 20th century, the Norwegian Arne Naess, died a few years ago at the age of 96. His passing was noted in some mainstream media, but, unfortunately, few in the mainstream know of the man or, more important, his ideas. In 1995 he described himself as a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. “I am, to the astonishment of certain journalists, an optimist,” he said. “But then I add I am an optimist about the 22nd century. And they say: ‘Oh, you mean the 21st?’ No, 22nd century! I think that in the 21st century, we have to go through very bad times and it will hurt even rich countries. Now it is all sailing smoothly—but it will hurt the rich.”
That seems a prescient observation. It looks like very bad times ahead for rich and poor alike in this century, though, as always, poor countries will suffer more than the rich. It seems to me that Arne Naess’ ideas, which were influenced by Buddhism, Spinoza, Gandhi and Rachael Carson’s seminal book “Silent Spring,” are a sort of template for long-range optimism during short-range hard times.
Naess is best known for coining the phrase “deep ecology,” which gives a theoretical foundation for the radical (to some) idea that mankind must drastically change its relationship with nature. He viewed deep ecology as different but not necessarily incompatible or at odds with what he termed “the shallow ecology movement.” The principles of deep ecology involve the purpose of human life within nature and the human values at work in environmental conflicts. Shallow ecology stops short of questioning or changing the basic tenets of consumer driven materialism and modern industrial economics, instead promoting as good environmentalism technological solutions like recycling, energy efficiency, green building standards, solar and wind power and the like, all of which are commendable and useful but do not address what Naess viewed as the root causes of, among other things, the 21st century’s bad times.
Naess’ ideas, careers as a philosopher, teacher (the youngest at 27 to ever become a professor at the University of Oslo), one of Norway’s leading mountaineers and environmental/social activists are too deep (sic) for a small column, but just these four of the eight points of the deep ecology platform are worth contemplating: 1) The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves (synonyms: inherent worth; intrinsic value; inherent value). These values are independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes… 4) Present human interference with the nonhuman world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening… 6) Policies must therefore be changed. The changes in policies affect basic economic, technological and ideological structures. The resulting state of affairs will be deeply different from the present… 7) The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent worth) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living. There will be a profound awareness of the difference between big and great.
There are several good books and plenty of information readily available about Deep Ecology and Arne Naess for those who are interested in, for instance, the personal, social and environmental ramifications of humans “…appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent worth) rather than adhering to an increasingly higher standard of living.”
Most people reading this know many people who do adhere to an increasingly higher standard of living while not dwelling in situations of inherent worth, perhaps, in some cases, the reader included. And most people on earth are aware at some level that “Present human interference in the nonhuman world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening.” Far too many people do not know, or accept, or want to believe that “The well-being and flourishing of human and nonhuman life on Earth have value in themselves…independent of the usefulness of the nonhuman world for human purposes.” But who among us could object to “…a profound awareness of the difference between big and great?”
Arne Naess was often misunderstood and attacked by people threatened by his ideas, sometimes called things like “eco-fascist.” But Naess always insisted that widening compassion towards non-humans did not imply diminishing compassion towards humans. He said, “We don’t say that every living being has the same value as a human, but that it has an intrinsic value which is not quantifiable. It is not equal or unequal. It has a right to live and blossom. I may kill a mosquito if it is on the face of my baby but I will never say I have a higher right to life than a mosquito.”
The world lost one of the great men of the past hundred years when Naess died, but if there is cause for optimism about humanity and planet Earth in the 22nd century it is in some significant part because he lived and the ideas he left behind.
Check them out. We need all the causes for optimism we can find.

A glacier is an exotic phenomenon of nature. It is born with a snowflake and dies when its last bit of ice turns to moisture and sinks into the earth, rises into the atmosphere or runs back home to the sea. Most people have never seen a glacier except, perhaps, at a distance. Few have actually stood, walked or climbed on one and seen and felt its majesty and menace, life and movement, beauty and connections to one’s own existence. Those who do are most often adventurers or natives of the far reaches of the earth whose subsistence is tied to knowledge of ice. Fewer still, most of them scientists in esoteric fields, have any intellectual understanding of the value of glaciers and the larger world of natural ice near the poles and their relationship to deserts, starvation in Africa, agriculture in South America, survival of the polar bear and, perhaps, mankind itself.
The ice of glaciers is, among other things, a repository of the natural history of earth, and most of its glaciers are retreating and vanishing and no one knows exactly what that might mean or what is to be done about it. Every mountaineer I know has seen it. Every person knowledgeable and concerned about global warming, the expanding desertification of earth, the compounding rate of species extinctions, the multitudes of people who are starving to death as these words are read, and the “totality of all life” given form and expression through the intricate connections between all things, like the toxic pollution of an oil refinery in Texas and the death of the last polar bear in the arctic, knows that global warming is melting the glaciers and the polar ice. Scientists have measured the decline of ice, as many with less formal training have noted it, but no one knows what it portends or what might be its consequences to the earth, its wildlife and oceans and to the heart and soul and future of man. No sane, honest person thinks it is good.
All too many people, especially those in the most polluting corporate industries and their pals in the halls of power in Washington whose parochial worldview is narrow and cramped and hardly a millimeter above the bottom line, don’t care. Who cares if a few glaciers vanish? With all the ice in the arctic and Antarctic, what does it matter if some of it melts? Even if the atmosphere is warming up a few degrees, it’s not very much and isn’t it just part of nature’s eternal cycles? But in the real world of reality, the real melting of glaciers is the result of man’s greed and carelessness, and it is only an illusion that he is superior to nature and that commerce and economic matters are his purpose on earth.
In her beautiful book, “The Future of Ice,” American writer Gretel Ehrlich carves out her own answers to such questions, and she inspires the reader to examine why they need to be asked in the first place. The book relates her travels in glacier/polar landscapes over the course of a year from Tierra del Fuego in the south to Spitsbergen, east of Greenland, in the north in search to the answer to this question: “…what would happen if we became ‘deseasoned,’ if winter disappeared as a result of global warming.” Ehrlich’s work is not easily categorized, but she has few peers in creating evocative prose about the landscape through which she moves and her own personal inner landscape which moves her. That the two worlds are not separate, that they are in reality impermeable and part of the same setting is a central message of “The Future of Ice.” She calls it “…both ode and lament, a wild time song and elegy, and a cry for help—not for me, but for the tern, the ice cap, the polar bear, and the lenga forest; for the river of weather and the ways it chooses to be born.”
In just one paragraph of the introduction Ehrlich touches on vulnerability, the heart, the mind, illusions and how they affect the future of ice on earth and much more. She writes: “We’re spoiled because we’ve been living in an interglacial paradise for twenty thousand years. Now we’re losing it. Climate stability, not to mention human superiority and economic viability, are illusions we must give up. Our can-do American optimism and our head-in-the-sand approach to economics when it takes into mind only profit and not the biological health of the planet—has left us one-sided. Too few of us remember how to be heartbroken. Or why we should be. We don’t look because heartbreak might imply failure. But the opposite is true. A broken heart is an open heart, like a flower unfolding from its calyx, the one nourishing the other.”
She is right. Whether or not we look, and whether we look in time to break our hearts, will determine the future of ice.

Foreward
By
Dick Dorworth

The premise of this book and the larger issues it encompasses are common to every human being, not just the climbers, skiers and other high level athletes you will meet in its pages. It is crucial to an appreciation of “The Alchemy of Action” to hold in mind that just as every person is different from every other in obvious ways, they are much more alike and have much more in common in ways both palpable and, at first glance, invisible. This includes similarities and differences in culture, time and place, which are often enough examined and discussed in the popular media, and our common human metabolism, which is not.
I mention this because this book grew out of a particular place in climbing and a specific American time and culture in which that place (Yosemite) was a high-pressure, free-form, colorful laboratory for the experiments of the culture, the rebellions of the time and the expansion of consciousness of its lab rats. The time was the late 1960s and early 1970s and the turned-on, tuned-in, dropped-out culture was counter to the mainstream, rebelling against, among other things, Viet Nam and the American mentality and values that allowed it. Consciousness altering drugs—LSD, peyote, marijuana, psilocybin and others were an intrinsic aspect of that culture, and several (not all) of the finest rock climbers of that time were icons and leaders in the process of both expanding consciousness and raising climbing standards.
One of them was Doug Robinson, who was/is prone to pay more attention to the on-going experiments of his own person than most, and whose tenacity and curiosity as a researcher, philosophizer’s breadth of thought and literary skills have delivered to the fortunate reader “The Alchemy of Action.” This book has been a lifetime of the author’s in the making. As a young teen-age distance runner Robinson noted a shift in his perceptions, a different clarity of thought and, of course, a physical heightened awareness during and just after long runs in the hills around Los Gatos, California where he grew up. Later he came to climbing and noticed similar alterations in his being. And then came the 60s and the cultural changes and the drugs and the (sometimes) purposeful exploration of consciousness, which had nothing to do with climbing. Or, at least, so he thought for awhile.
By 1969 he was confident enough that the act of climbing could and did alter consciousness that he wrote the seminal essay “The Climber as Visionary.” It was published in Ascent and caused a stir in the climbing community for suggesting that “There is an interesting relationship between the climber-visionary and his counterpart in the neighboring subculture of psychedelic drug users” and that climbing and its attendant fear “…produces a chemical climate in the body that is conducive to visionary experience.” And the climbing literature from John Muir to Yvon Chouinard to Ueli Steck is filled with beautiful descriptions of that experience.
Doug Robinson knew he was on to something meaningful and little explored. He spent the next 40 years—along with climbing, guiding, writing, raising children, continuing his own laboratory experiments with various drugs and expanding consciousness and the other demands of responsible citizens of planet Earth—investigating that something which he describes as: “…effort plus a degree of fear shifts yours brain in the direction of seeing more sharply, more clearly. And feeling more deeply. It does that by shifting the dynamic balance of hormones in your head. And then, transforming some of them. The upshot is a change in metabolism that becomes literally psychedelic.”
Human metabolism is too complex to be described in a few words or an entire book, and “The Alchemy of Action” is certainly not the final word, but it is an invaluable step, a beautiful and important addition to the literature of human consciousness. As one of the lab rats of Yosemite in the ‘60s and ‘70s and a member in good standing of the counter-culture of the time (as well as being a long-time friend of Doug’s and presented in the book as an example of its premise) I immediately identified with it and am grateful to him for a better understanding of consciousness (they are not the same thing). It has been nearly 30 years since I became aware that I didn’t need psychedelics in order to expand my consciousness and center both mind and being, and I quit using them. I also quit using alcohol which is certainly a mind-altering substance but, so far as I have been able to determine, has never produced clarity of thought or expansion of consciousness among its many users. Au contraire.
Doug Robinson was the right person in he right time to take the experiences and lessons of Yosemite in the ’60s and ‘70s and turn them into a metabolic exploration of a state of being common to all people that has been described as ‘flow,’ ’the zone,’ ‘peak performance,’ ‘self-awareness’ and the like. “The Alchemy of Action” is a metabolic guide to that state, and, as Doug writes, “We’re all metabolic voyagers, every day.”