role has contributed to the alienation of man from himself." Næss added that from a deep ecology point of view "the right of all forms [of life] to live is a universal right which cannot be quantified. No single species of living being has more of this particular right to live and unfold than any other species". As Bron Taylor and Michael Zimmerman have recounted,a key event in the development of deep ecology was the "Rights of Non-Human Nature" conference held at a college in Claremont, California in 1974 [which] drew many of those who would become the intellectual architects of deep ecology. These included George Sessions who, like Naess, drew on Spinoza's pantheism, later co-authoring Deep Ecology - [Living as if Nature Mattered] with Bill Devall; Gary Snyder, whose remarkable, Pulitzer prize-winning Turtle Island proclaimed the value of place-based spiritualities, indigenous cultures, and animistic perceptions, ideas that would become central within deep ecology subcultures; and Paul Shepard, who in The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, and subsequent works such as Nature and Madness and Coming Home to the Pleistocene, argued that foraging societies were ecologically superior to and emotionally healthier than agricultur[al societies]. Shepard and Snyder especially provided a cosmogony that explained humanity's fall from a pristine, nature paradise. Also extremely influential was Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, which viewed the desert as a sacred place uniquely able to evoke in people a proper, non-anthropocentric understanding of the value of nature. By the early 1970s the above figures put in place the intellectual foundations of deep ecology. Sources Deep ecology is an eco-philosophy derived from intuitive ethical principles. It does not claim to be a science, although it is based generally on the new physics, which, in the early 20th century, undermined the reductionist approach and the notion of objectivity, demonstrating that humans are an integral part of nature; this is a common concept always held by primal peoples. Devall and Sessions, however, note that the work of many ecologists has encouraged the adoption of an "ecological consciousness", quoting environmentalist Aldo Leopold's view that such a consciousness "changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land community to plain member and citizen of it." Though some detractors assert that deep ecology is based on the discredited idea of the "balance of nature", deep ecologists have made no such claim. They do not dispute the theory that human