Researching David Orton

In his extensive writings for a variety of magazines, journals, websites and his own "Green Web", Orton warned about what he saw as the disastrous effects of basing a society's economy on mass consumption, profit and the exploitation of people and other living beings. "An industrial capitalist society, that does not recognize ecological limits but only perpetual economic expansion and has the profit motive as driver, will eventually consume and destroy itself," he wrote in an online commentary. "But we will all be taken down with it." Orton argued that industrialism, not capitalism, was at the root of ecological destruction. "Industrialism can have a capitalist or a socialist face," he said.

Left biocentrism affirms what one writer calls "a 'collective spirituality' based on the ultimate value of the Earth and its life-forms." Orton himself said that left biocentrism views all living things and the Earth itself as sharing a community. "With such a community," he wrote, "there is a sense of Earth spirituality, as in past animistic indigenous societies, where it acted as a restraint upon human exploitation of nature." Thinkers who influenced Orton and his left-biocentric colleagues included Arne Næss, Richard Sylvan, Rudolph Bahro, and John Livingston.

David Orton practised the voluntary simplicity that is a central tenet of left biocentrism. For 27 years, he lived with his wife and frequent co-author Helga Hoffmann-Orton in a small, 100-year-old farmhouse in Pictou County, Nova Scotia. They grew much of their own food and watched as their 130-acre property gradually reverted to forest habitat for a variety of plants, animals and birds. Orton died of pancreatic cancer in 2011 at age 77. At his own request, he was given a "deep green" burial in the forest near his home.