Normally The Green Interview produces its own biographies of the people we interview — but the interview with David Orton is unique in several ways.

To begin with, David was a highly-regarded proponent of “deep ecology,” a perspective that sees all life forms – man, moose or microbe – as having an equal right to survive and flourish. But he was not only an ecological philosopher and a bold thinker; he was also a deeply principled man who made a remarkable effort to live in accordance with his beliefs, minimizing his ecological footprint by subsisting on a small hill farm in Nova Scotia which he and his wife, Helga Hoffmann-Orton, deliberately allowed to return to forest.