page_title: David Orton (deep ecology)
section_title: Politics and teaching
hierarchical_section_title: David Orton (deep ecology) / Making of an activist / Politics and teaching
caption_attribution_description: English: Che Guevara in his trademark olive-green military fatigues, June 2, 1959 Cuba.
context_page_description: David Keith Orton was a Canadian writer, thinker and environmental activist who played a leading role in developing "left biocentrism" within the philosophy of deep ecology. Orton and his collaborators added the word "left" to biocentrism to indicate their anti-industrial, anti-capitalist orientation and their concern for social justice. Their 10-point Left Biocentrism Primer, published in 1998, accepts the idea that the natural world belongs to all living things, but it also calls for the ethical principles of deep ecology to be applied to sensitive political issues such as working for a reduction in the human population, achieving justice for aboriginal peoples, struggling for workers' rights and redistributing wealth. Orton, however, frequently asserted that the rights of nature had to come first. "Social justice is only possible in a context of ecological justice," he wrote. "We have to move from a shallow, human-centered ecology to a deeper all-species centered ecology." Elsewhere he added: "There is no justice for people on a dead planet."
context_section_description: During his studies in New York, David Orton became engaged in the political struggles that would continue for the rest of his life. He writes that he was influenced by the movement against the Vietnam War and left-wing politics in general. Off campus, he worked in the offices of Science & Society, which describes itself as "the longest continuously published journal of Marxist scholarship, in any language, in the world." On campus, Orton joined other students in demanding that their professors give them more of a say in the content of the courses they were being taught. "It was an uphill battle," Orton writes.
  After graduate school, Orton returned to Montreal where he taught as a lecturer in sociology at Sir George Williams from 1967-1969. At first, the university seemed eager to hire a "local boy" who had done well academically. But Orton's brand of socialism and his immersion in the hippie culture of New York's Greenwich Village did not endear him to his colleagues in the sociology department. "I had a beard," he writes "and hippy beads around my neck, with the casual clothes to match."
  
  Differences in outlook soon led to a series of clashes. Orton advocated blending socialist theory and practice, but those he termed "academic Marxists," wanted him to stop trying to organize and learn German so that he could read Marx in his original language. Orton's proposed reading lists for his classes and his tentative ideas for allowing students to influence course content led to a full meeting of the department where he was rebuked for not sharing "the consensus of the discipline of sociology." His involvement with the "Movement for Socialist Liberation" displeased university officials especially when the group actively opposed the on-campus recruitment of students by war-related industries.
  After the death of the revolutionary communist Che Guevara in 1967, Orton wrote an article for the student newspaper that he says, landed him in considerable trouble:
  Che Guevara was no coffee-house revolutionary. He could not be classified as an academic Marxist. Many of these gentlemen—who may be spotted on university campuses in America and Canada, well salaried, well fed and well clothed—make absolute distinctions between revolutionary theory and revolutionary action...Che had an interest in revolutionary theory but he also believed in praxis. His message was brutally simple, yet profound: The revolution will be made by those who act, not by those who endlessly talk and contribute to left-wing journals, regarding strategy, tactics, objective versus subjective conditions, etc, etc.
  In 1969, the university did not renew his teaching contract partly because Orton had not completed his PhD thesis, but also, he writes, because of general hostility toward him from other faculty members. For example, English professor David Sheps wrote an article for the magazine Canadian Dimension that attacked Orton's scholarly credentials:
  He is a self-proclaimed Marxist Leninist who, as far as anyone can tell, has read practically no Marx or Lenin. Since he also refuses on principle to read 'bourgeois sociology' (which he seems to interpret broadly enough to include most left-wing sociologists), many have wondered if he has read anything at all. The Sociology department had chosen not to renew his contract, a decision every left-wing faculty member regarded as eminently sensible.
  Orton writes that the article "helped to create the material conditions such that I would never again obtain a full-time teaching position in Canada."
caption: Che Guevara in 1959. David Orton admired Che's practise of revolutionary principles
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