Case 3

Hans Dirk van Hoogstraten, Deep Economy: Caring for Ecology, Humanity and Religion (Cambridge: James Clarke, 2001).

Hans Hoogstraten compares economy with ecology, assuming that "people want to live comfortably in their 'house'." As emancipated citizens of democracy, to do this they must obey the laws and rules taught to them by the economy. Therefore, modern people are not naturally adapted to nature and thus feel alienated from it. Humanity's self-centeredness makes it impossible to accept a modest position among other species. Rejecting the distinction between deep and shallow ecology made my Naess and others, he argues that there is more intrinsic value in a human being that in a mosquito or virus, more in a chimpanzee that is a bacterium. He writes that this judgment of intrinsic value is quite different from the judgment of the importance of a species to the interrelated whole--the bacterium may in fact be more important to the working of the interrelated whole than the chimpanzee.