The desanctification of nature

Abstract

The theme of the environment is one of the most popular and pressing themes of the present time. Somewhat late in the day we have become aware that we have been blindly secreting around ourselves conditions in which it is increasingly difficult for human or any other life to be lived. We have managed to build up a technological and economic order based on machine production and the possession of material goods which inescapably determines to a greater or lesser degree die lives of all the individuals born into it, reducing a great many of them to a state bordering on panic or hysteria. Indeed, we are told that the only real issue before us in this respect is whether uncontrolled technological destruction or uncontrolled population will be the first to tear the fabric of our civilisation to pieces. In spite of this, in the name of a ‘war on want’ or of developing ‘underdeveloped’ countries, or simply of progress or evolution or efficiency we go on methodically trying to apply on an even more diorough and extensive scale-on a global scale - exactly the same techniques and habits which have brought about the bleakness of our own world - a bleakness which one might describe as resulting at least in part from a desanctification of nature.