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Declaration of Interdependence

A Brief Chronology

The evolution of this expression is an eloquent example of how ideas perculate through culture. There have been various claims, not all accurate, about who wrote the Greenpeace “Declaration of Interdependence” in 1976, which included the “3 Laws of Ecology.” In fact, both ideas existed in other forms before Greenpeace published them in 1976.

1936: Henry Wallace made reference to a "Declaration of Interdependence" in a political context, interdependence among nations and cultures.

July 1936: Walter P. Taylor wrote "What is Ecology and What Good is it?" in Ecology 17 (July 1936), and he quoted Henry Wallace. This is perhaps the earliest ecological usage of the term, “Declaration of Interdependence.”

1944: Will Durant refered to a “Declaration of Interdependence”in a social and cultural context, speaking about racial and religious tolerance within a community.

1968: Roderick Nash, read Wallace’s quote in Taylor’s book. After the infamous Santa Barbara oil spill, Nash titled a television talk about ecology “A Declaration of Interdependence.”

1969: Ecology Action founder Cliff Humphrey, his friend Thomas Jefferson, and others wrote a manifeso (with fifty-two signatures), possibly influenced by Nash, called “The Unanimous Declaration of Interdependence” This was published in the Whole Earth Catalogue Supplement, September 1969. Humphrey and Ecology Action were direct influences on Bob Hunter of Greenpeace.

1970s: Gary Snyder used the term “Declaration of Interdependence,” at least in conversation, and may have used it once in Co-Evolution Quarterly, but he cannot remember when. Co-Ev Editor Stewart Brand remembers Snyder using the expression, but also can’t remember when or where. (If you can reference any of these uses, please contact this site).

In any case, by the 1970s the term “Declaration of Interdependence” was loose in the North American culture. It is the sort of phrase that, once imagined, seems obvious. At Greenpeace in 1974-5 the expression surfaced regularly.

1976: Bob Hunter and Patrick Moore wrote the Greenpeace “Declaration of Interdependence,” which we published in the Greenpeace Chroncles (Winter 1976-77), and which included the “Three Laws of Ecology,” namely Interdependence, Stability related to Diversity, and Limits to Growth. The “3 Laws” borrowed ideas from Barry Commoner, particularly his four “Laws of Ecology” in The Closing Circle (Knopf, 1971).

1990: A Declaration of Interdependence, in reference to both peace and ecology was composed at Naropa Institute in Colorado by writers and poets Victor Hernandez Cruz, Anne Waldman, Rick Fields, Allen Ginsberg, Joanne Kyger, Antler, Jeff Poniewaz, Ed Sanders, Gary Snyder, Peter Warshall, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Mary Kean, Dave Cope, & others. See text online.

1992: David Suzuki and others wrote a "Declaration of Interdependence" for the Earth Summit in Rio.

2002: Wade Davis, a devoteded naturalist, used the term politically: "We must aspire to create a new international spirit of pluralism, a true global democracy in which unique cultures, large and small, are allowed the right to exist … a global declaration of interdependence."

Likewise, during the rise of ecological thought in the 1960s and 70s, other ideas arose: Planetary Citizenship, Allegience to the Earth, Biocracy, Animal Rights, Deep Ecology and so forth. Humanity has been irreversibly changing ecosystems on Earth for at least five thousand years, and yet is still in its infancy of understanding its relationship with the biosphere of which it is a part.

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Henry Wallace: American editor, writer, and political theorist, who advocated for peace and “interdependence” among nations, born in Iowa in 1888. In 1936, as US Secretary of Agriculture under Franklin Roosevelt, Henry Wallace, made the remark "Declaration of Interdependence" in reference to global political interdependence. In 1943 he responded to Henry Luce’s vision of “an American Century,” calling, rather, for “a Century of the Common Man." Later, Wallace disputed with Harry Truman over Cold War policy, advocating that US security would be strengthened through cooperation with the Soviets, not agression, an “interdependence” of nations, in addition to political alliances.

Henry Wallace biography and bibliography

For an excellent account of Wallace’s relationship with the Roosevelts, his opposition to dropping the nuclear bomb, and his subsequent political exile, see Robert L. Baker’s 2003 story in Executive Intelligence Review, “Henry Wallace Would Never Have Dropped the Bomb on Japan.”

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Walter P. Taylor was president of the Ecological Society of America in July 1936, when he wrote "What is Ecology and What Good is it?" in ECOLOGY 17. He linked Henry Wallace’s idea of “interdependence” to ecology. “There is little rugged individualism in nature," he wrote. An ecosystem is a "closely organized cooperative community of plants and animals."

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Will Durant, Pulitzer Prize-winning philosopher, made his "Declaration of Interdependence” in 1944. He wrote: "… just as no state can now survive by its own unaided power, so no democracy can long endure without recognizing and encouraging the interdependence of the racial and religious groups composing it."

Two leaders of the Jewish and Christian communities had approached Durrant about a project to raise social moral standards. “I talked them out of it,” wrote Durant, and suggested, instead, that they work specifically against racial intolerance.

“I … proposed a Declaration of Interdependence. I thought the phrase was original with me, but found it had been used before.”

In his co-autobiography with Ariel Durant’s dual autobiography, he wrote, “the motto of the coming generations should be interdependence.”

Durant’s “Declaration of Interdependence” was made public on March 22, 1945 in Hollywood. Durant escorted his black housekeeper, Bleeker McGlendon, to the gala.

"When he arrived he startled all of us, white and black alike,” Ariel Durant wrote later. “I could imagine a hundred interdependent souls whispering, ‘Good God! Does he take this business seriously?’"

The declaration was featured the next day in the Los Angeles Times, March 23, 1945 and was entered into the US Congressional Record in 1949, influencing the civil rights movement that emerged in the 1950s.

Will Durant Foundation
Text of Durant’s “Declaration of Interdependence.”

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Roderick Nash received his Ph.D. in History (U. of Wisconsin in Madison). In 1966, he offered the first American courses in environmental history at the University of California in Santa Barbara. A year later, he published Wilderness and the American Mind (Yale University Press), one of the most influential books of the Twentieth Century. The Santa Barbara oil spill in 1969 inspired his television talk, "A Declaration of Interdependence," a term he picked up from Henry Wallace through Walter Taylor’s, "What is Ecology and What Good is it?"

Nash quotes Wallace in "The Rights of Nature" (p.59) but doesn’t discuss his own use of the term. However, Hal Rothman mentions Nash’s usage in The Greening of a Nation? Environmentalism in the United States since 1945 (Harcourt Brace, 1998, p.103). Also see Ted Steinberg’s Down to Earth: Nature’s Role in American History (NY: OUP, 2002).

Selected Nash Bibliography: Wilderness and the American Mind (Yale U. Press, 1967); Environment and Americans – the Problem of Priorities (Krieger, 1979); The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (U. of Wisconsin, 1989).

For excerpts and book links, see the erraticimpact listing for Nash.

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Ecology Action 1969
“The Unanimous Declaration of Interdependence”
By Cliff Humphrey, Thomas Jefferson, and friends, 1969.

When in the course of evolution it becomes necessary for one species to denounce the notion of independence from all the rest, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the interdependent station, to which the natural laws of the cosmos have placed them, a decent respect for the opinions of all mankind requires that they should declare the conditions which impel them to assert their interdependence.

We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all species have evolved with equal and unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness; that to insure these rights, nature has instituted certain principles for the sustenance of all species, deriving these principles from the capabilities of the planet’s life-support system; that whenever any behavior by members of one species becomes destructive to these principles, it is the function of other members of that species to alter or abolish such behavior and to reestablish the theme of interdependence with all life, in such a form and in accordance with those natural principles that will effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that cultural values long established should not be altered for light and transient causes, that mankind is more disposed to suffer from asserting a vain notion of independence that to right itself by abolishing that culture to which it is now accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations of these principles of interdependence, evinces a subtle design to reduce them, through absolute despoliation of the planet’s fertility, to a state of ill will, bad health, and great anxiety, it is their right, it is their duty to throw off such notions of independence from other species and from the life support system, and to provide new guards for the re-establishment of the security and maintenance of these principles. Such has been the quiet and patient sufferage of all species, and such is now the necessity which constrains the species of Homo sapiens to reassert the principles of interdependence. The history of the present notion of independence is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations all having in direct effect the establishment of an absolute tyranny over life. To prove this let facts be submitted to a candid world.

WE therefore, among the mortal representatives of the eternal process of life and evolutionary principles, in mutual humbleness, explicitly stated, appealing to the ecological consciousness of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do solemnly publish and declare that all species are interdependent; that they are all free to realize these relationships to the full extent of their capabilities; that each species is subservient to the requirements of the natural processes that sustain life. And for the support of this declaration with a firm reliance on all other members of our species who understand their consciousness as a capability, to assist all of us and our brothers to interact in order to realize a life process that manifests its maximum potential of diversity, vitality and planetary fertility to ensure the continuity of life on earth.

Signed ECOLOGY ACTION, Cliff Humphrey, Thomas Jefferson, and 50 other “concerned Homo sapiens.”

Originally published in the Whole Earth Catalogue Supplement, September 1969, and included in Sources, edited by Theodore Roszak (Harper, 1972; p.388):

Online version at Mother Earth News.

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Gary Snyder

Gary Snyder was born in San Francisco in 1930 and grew up in the rural Pacific Northwest. He attended Reed College in Portland, where he met poets Philip Whalen and Lew Welch and published his first poems in the school’s literary magazine. In 1952, he rented a cottage in Berkeley and studied Asian languages. He would later live in Kyoto, Japan and practice meditation at the Daitoku-ji Zen monastery. In the meantime, his Berkeley cottage became a west coast annex for the Beat poets. Snyder shared the poetry stage the night Allen Ginsberg first read "Howl,” and he influenced both Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac in the ways of Buddhism and in his unwavering reverence for nature. Kerouac idolized the naturalist bard and portrayed him as "Japhy Ryder" in the novel The Dharma Bums. Snyder published his first book of poetry, Riprap, in 1959. Throughout the edgy craziness of the Beat era, the alcohol and drug-taking, and the cultural upheavals of the 1960s, Snyder remained a calming, spiritual influence, continually reminding his peers and readers that culture and sacredness ultimately derive from the earth itself. His poetry collection Turtle Island won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize, the year Greenpeace first confronted the whalers on the high seas. He edited the landmark Journal for the Protection of All Beings (City Lights) in 1978 and wrote in the introduction:

“Now we must become warrior-lovers in the service of the Great Goddess Gaia, Mother of the Buddha. The stakes are all of organic evolution. Any childish thoughts of transcending nature or slipping off into Space must wait on this work – really, of learning finally who and where we are, acknowledging the beauty, walking in beauty.”

In January, 1979, we published Snyder’s poem “To All,” in the Greenpeace Chronicles. Here, Snyder finds the voice of allegience to the earth while fording a cool creek in the northern rockies, and he writes:

I pledge allegiance to the soil
of Turtle Island,
and to the beings who thereon dwell
one ecosystem
in diversity
under the sun
With joyful interpenetration for all.

The full text of this poem can be found in No Nature: New and Selected Poems (New York: Pantheon, 1992) and Online.

Selected bibliography: Riprap (Kyoto, Japan: Origin Press, 1959); Myths & Texts (New York: Totem Press/Corinth Books, 1960; London: Centaur, 1960); The Back Country (London: Fulcrum Press, 1967; New York: New Directions, 1968); Turtle Island (New Directions, 1974); Axe Handles (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1983); and essays in Earth House Hold (New Directions, 1969; London: Cape, 1970); The Real Work: Interviews & Talks 1964-1979, edited by William Scott McLean (New Directions, 1980); and The Practice of the Wild (North Point Press, 1990).

Also see Critical Essays on Gary Snyder, ed. Patrick Murphy (G.K. Hall & Co., 1991).

For a more complete bibliography and links, see Paul Reuben’s “Perspectives in American Literature,” Gary Snyder.

There are good Snyder links at PoemHunter.

For ecology with a sense of humor, see his Smokey the Bear Sutra.

U. of Illinois site about Snyder’s work.

For a bibliography of nature poets and anthologies, see Notes & Resources from the Greenpeace book.

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Greenpeace Declaration of Interdependence

In 1969, Bob Hunter met Cliff Humphrey at Ecology Action in Berkeley, the same summer Humphrey wrote his version. By 1974, the term “Declaration of Interdependence” was known among the Greenpeace group in Vancouver. Since 1969, Hunter had been discussing ecology and ideas such as the Green Panthers, the Greenhawks, The Whole Earth Church, and various forms of ecological action. Dr. Paul Spong came up with the idea to use direct action techniques to save other species, namely the whales, in 1973. Between then and the first Greenpeace whale campaign in 1975, Hunter had written several ecological manifestos. He condensed these ideas into the “Declaration of Interdependence.” The version in the Greenpeace Chronicles is not credited, although the prose is clearly Hunter’s. The “Three basic Laws of Ecology,” came primarily from Patrick Moore albeit with inspiration from Barry Commoner and language from Hunter.

Greenpeace Declaration of Interdependence
Greenpeace Chronicles, Winter 1976-77

We have arrived at a place in history where decisive action must be taken to avoid a general environmental disaster. With nuclear reactors proliferating and over 900 species on the endangered list, there can be no further delay or our children will be denied their future.

The Greenpeace Foundation hopes to stimulate practical, intelligent actions to stem the tide of planetary destruction. We are “rainbowpeople” representing every race, every nation, every living creature. We are patriots, not of any one nation, state or military alliance, but of the entire earth.

It must be understood that the innocent word “ecology” contains a concept that is as revolutionary as anything since the Copernican breakthrough, when it was discovered that the earth was not the center of the entire universe. Through ecology, science has embarked on a quest for the great systems of order that underly the complex flow of life on our planet. This quest has taken us far beyond the realm of traditional scientific thought. Like religion, ecology seeks to answer the infinite mysteries of life itself. Harnessing the tools of logic, deduction, analysis, and empiricism, ecology may prove to be the first true science-religion.

As suddenly as Copernicus taught us that the earth was not the center of the universe, ecology teaches us that mankind is not the center of life on this planet. Each species has its function in the scheme of life. Each has a role, however obscure that role may be.

Ecology has taught us that the entire earth is part of our “body” and that we must learn to respect it as much as we respect ourselves. As we love ourselves, we must also love all forms of life in the planetary system – the whales, the seals, the forests, and the seas. The tremendous beauty of ecological thought is that it shows us a pathway back to an understanding of the natural world – an understanding that is imperative if we are to avoid a total collapse of the global ecosystem.

Ecology has provided us with many insights. These may be grouped into three basic “Laws of Ecology,” which hold true for all forms of life – fish, plants, insects, plankton, whales, and humans. These laws may be stated as follows:

The First Law of Ecology states that all forms of life are interdependent. The prey is as dependent on the predator for the control of its population as the predator is on the prey for a supply of food.

The Second Law of Ecology states that the stability (unity, security, harmony, togetherness) of ecosystems is dependant on their diversity (complexity). An ecosystem that contains 100 different species is more stable than an exosystem that has only three species. Thus the complex tropical rain-forest is more stable than the fragile arctic tundra.

The Third Law of Ecology states that all resources (food, water, air, minerals, energy) are finite and there are limits to the growth of all living systems. These limits are finally dictated by the finite size of the earth and the finite input of energy from the sun.

If we ignore the logical implications of these Laws of Ecology, we will continue to be guilty of crimes against the earth. We will not be judged by men for these crimes, but with a justice meeted out by the earth itself. The destruction of the earth will lead, inevitably, to the destruction of ourselves.

So let us work together to put an end to the destruction of the earth by the forces of human greed and ignorance. Through an understanding of the principles of ecology, we must find new directions for the evolution of human values and human institutions. Short-term economics must be replaced with actions based on the need for conservation and preservation of the entire global ecosystem. We must learn to live in harmony, not only with our fellow humans, but with all the beautiful creatures on this planet.

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Barry Commoner’s Laws of Ecology were published in The Closing Circle (Knopf, 1971). They are:

1. Everything is Connected to Everything Else. There is one ecosphere for all living organisms and what affects one, affects all.

2. Everything Must Go Somewhere. There no "waste" in nature and there is no “away” to which things can be thrown.

3. Nature Knows Best. Humankind has fashioned technology to improve upon nature, but such change in a natural system is, says Commoner, “likely to be detrimental to that system.”

4. There Is No Such Thing as a Free Lunch. In nature, both sides of the equation must balance, for every gain there is a cost, and all debts are eventually paid.

Barry Commoner, biography and links.

“The Environmental Crisis,” from The Closing Circle, online.

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David Suzuki: In 1992, Suzuki and a team of 5 authors wrote their own "Declaration of Interdependence" for the Earth Summit in Rio. Finnish composer Pehr Henrik Nordgren wrote “Symphony no. 6: Interdependence" in 2001, using this declaration as lyrics for the piece; performed in Sendai, Japan in December, 2001.

Text Online
David Suzuki Foundation

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