The focus of this chapter differs in several respects from those that
precede it. Process thinking has, until now, been compared with
environmental ethical approaches which, generally speaking, have
themselves made little comment on process thought. Here how-
ever, process thinking will be laid alongside an approach whose
promoters actively claim support from it: deep ecology. In addi-
tion, deep ecology does not only concern environmental ethics; it
also emphasizes metaphysics. The relationship between ethics and
metaphysics in deep ecology is a complex one, as I will go on to
explain. This chapter will compare process thinking (primarily that
of Whitehead, the process thinker to whom most deep ecologists
refer) with the metaphysics of deep ecology, a comparison which
is interesting in its own right, but which also has important
ethical implications.

A variety of claims are made by different deep ecologists concern-
ing process thinking. Fox ( 1984b: 149), for instance, claims that
Spinoza, Whitehead, and Heidegger 'articulate the vision' of deep
ecology, while Shepard ( 1969: 3) argues that 'the wisdom of deep
ecology' is manifest in 'current Whiteheadian philosophy'. One
would expect to find a substantial number of articles elaborating
such claims; after all, a small and frequently controversial new
philosophical school could only gain by revealing conceptual close-
ness to relatively illustrious philosophical ancestors. Such articles
do exist in the case of Heidegger and Spinoza. Both Arne Naess
( 1977: 418-26) and George Sessions ( 1977: 481) have written
reasonably substantial pieces on Spinoza; and Sessions ( Devall
and Sessions 1985: 98-100) and Zimmerman ( 1983: 99) on

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