When I was young, my father's passion for the outdoors took my family to many remarkable places. We camped under redwoods, beside boulder-edged rivers and newt-filled lakes, at the hem of gargantuan sand dunes. We hiked miles upward to turquoise alpine lakes and glaciers. My brother and I befriended chipmunks and marmots along the trails; found signs of bear and sometimes the bear itself; played hunter-gatherer with sticks and acorns; made shelters of branches.

Decades later, my career-track myopia, played out in large cities, supplanted all but a few tightly scheduled excursions to natural places, and even my awareness of the wilderness receded into coffee-table picture books of magnificent lands. And though those urban years were valuable, they sometimes seemed painfully sterile and lacking in meaning. At one point, I fell into despair. I suppose it would have been a good time to turn everything over to God, but I couldn't trust a higher power who, according to the version of Christianity I had learned, punished good people who slipped up once, and worked in mysterious, often unfair ways. Using meditation to find an inner calm failed, too; I had no inner calm to discover.

After one especially grim night while I was living in Boston, I found a bench by the river just as the sun was rising. To the backdrop of roaring commuter traffic, that gold disk once again proved itself a reliable, easy companion. At my feet a pair of sparrows awakened by the sun picked through the grass for seeds. For the several minutes I watched them my inner agony was quelled. That morning's peaceful respite got me through the rest of the day; and gradually, seeking outdoor moments and experiencing the remarkable world of nonhumans became a form of therapy for me.

A few years later, I was introduced to "deep ecology" at a workshop held at the Omega Institute in Rhinebeck. Deep ecology, I learned, is difficult to define because it means different things to different people: It has been variously described as a perspective, philosophy, discipline, phenomenon, form of spirituality, and more. At its core, though, is the affirmation that humans are inextricably enmeshed with the Earth's living and nonliving components.

Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess articulated the fundamental ideas of deep ecology in the 1960s, and coined the term. By the 1980s, he and several others were clarifying the concept intellectually, ethically, spiritually, and practically. Naess and George Sessions articulated the principles that Earth's nonhuman life has intrinsic value independent of any usefulness to people; that humans have the "right" to reduce the richness and diversity of nonhuman life only to fulfill vital needs, but that humans are exceeding that right; that all life, including humanity, could flourish nonetheless if our actions toward nature were to change. The change needed, however, is not only intellectual. What needs to happen is a deep, spiritual, experiential reawakening to our interconnectedness with the living earth.

"Through thousands of years of conditioning, absorbed by osmosis from the day we were born, we have succeeded in creating this incredibly pervasive illusion of separation from nature," says John Seed, environmental activist and facilitator of the Omega workshop on deep ecology, called The Council of All Beings. Seed developed the workshop with Joanna Macy (author of Earth As Lover, Earth As Self and coauthor with Seed of Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings) to move humanity away from the pervasive anthropocentric mindset toward one that is biocentric—valuing all life.

"Every intact indigenous culture that we look at has, at its root, a series of ceremonies and rituals whereby the human community acknowledges and nourishes its interconnectedness with the land and the rest of the Earth community," says Seed. "We 'moderns' may be the first culture, in our arrogance, to relegate these things to the realm of mumbo jumbo. [But] we have a deep longing for reconnection with the Earth. With this longing repressed, a host of displacement activities arise. We feel a pervasive emptiness and spend our lives trying to fill the gaping wound with all manner of 'stuff.' We dig up and chop down the Earth to make and power all the hair-driers and microwave ovens and electric toothbrushes with which we try, unsuccessfully, to fill the hole. It's not really all these material goods we want, however, but a certain psychological state that we imagine will follow. It never does, of course, and no amount of 'stuff' brings us peace."

Rupert Sheldrake, one of several contemporary writers on the reemergence of a reconnecting with nature, writes in The Rebirth of Nature: The Greening of Science and God, "From the time of our remotest ancestors until the seventeenth century, it was taken for granted that the world of nature was alive. But in the last three centuries, growing numbers of educated people have come to think of nature as lifeless. In the official world—the world of work, business, and politics—nature is conceived of as the inanimate source of natural resources, exploitable for economic development."

But there is another reality, Sheldrake continues: "In our unofficial, private world, nature is most strongly identified with the countryside as opposed to the city, and above all with unspoiled wilderness. Many people have emotional connections with particular places, often places associated with their childhood, or feel an empathy with animals or plants, or are inspired by the beauty of nature, or experience a mystical sense of unity with the natural world. Children frequently are brought up in an animistic atmosphere of fairy tales, talking animals, and magical transformations. For several generations, Westerners have grown used to living with these internal divisions." Sheldrake believes that such a split is spreading widely around the world.

Since Naess's earliest articulation of deep ecology, psychologists, environmentalists, sociologists, religious leaders, philosophers, and educators have generated a robust literature of magazine articles, books, websites, workshops, college courses, and a handful of videos on the topic. Deep ecology has impacted views and actions related to the environment in the arenas of activism, public policy, models of urban development and land use, sustainability, and politics.

Deep ecology is also a spiritual exploration and avenue of personal healing. "Most personal therapies are treating an illusory self, or what could be termed our small self, that is, a body separate from the rest of Creation," explains Bill Pfieffer, executive director of Sacred Earth Network (SEN), a nonprofit organization based in Petersham, Massachusetts. SEN's mission is to build a sustainable culture by teaching people to connect with the earth through experiences in nature and remembering indigenous wisdom. "Deep ecology at its best is not so much a philosophy, but a practice of shedding our sense of separation and experiencing ourselves as the Earth moving through us as food, water, air, and fire (metabolism). Seldom do we take the time to be aware and honor this greatest of mysteries. But when we actually feel that we are inextricably linked to a vast web of life, we get needed perspective on our neurosis and see it as a small, rather unimportant part of ourselves. I believe waking up to our larger, real, ecological Self is fundamental to us humans transitioning to a sustainable society."

In Ghent, New York, the Nature Institute offers workshops, field trips, talks, and even a weeks-long immersion course (Goethean Science Studies) to transform how people perceive the natural world. "We live in this culture of abstraction," explains director Craig Holdrege (and author of the acclaimed Genetics and the Manipulation of Life: The Forgotten Factor of Context). "We place concepts and models and ideas in front of our experience. So to have a spiritual experience in nature is not at all a given. At the Nature Institute, we work on transforming ourselves so we experience something very deep in nature—a sense of wholeness. Just being out in nature, attending to what happens around you, to the qualities of the light and the air, and the bird that flies across and what it does, walking in a wetland area, where the water isn't quite frozen and the light is being reflected in the water. You have this incredible play of nature. A practice we cultivate a lot is changing your perception through inner work, which allows one to be much more in touch with oneself as well as nature.

There is a very meditative aspect to this work." For example, people are asked to  "observe a plant very carefully, then to repicture it later, to really internalize what they see, not intellectually, but 'live into it.' Building up these internal pictures enriches a person's sensitivity and creates a full sensual experience. It also changes you, makes you more deeply connected to your own experience."

Holdrege expresses the core of deep ecology in a question: "If we extract ourselves out of the world, then what do we take our wholeness from?"