Man Against Nature :: Environment Pollution

Man Against Nature I perceived, and expect to perceive, a severe problem with our culture. We see the space we inhabit as not wild, as not constitution. Nature is in the parks, is in the mountains we gross out over to sun ourselves on the beach, in unreachable and savage depths of countries corresponding Brazil and continents like Africa. That is nature, we say, not this, not our home, not our workplace. A front-runner author of mine calls this an estranged worldview, a term she borrowed herself from Friedrich Engels. She describes it thusly We ar strangers to natur, to other human beings, to parts of ourselves. We see the world as make up of separate, isolated, nonliving parts that have no inherent value. They argon not even dead because death implies life.)i She goes on to say that when nature is empty of spirit, forests and trees become merely timber, something to be measured in notice feet, valued only for its profitability, not . . . even for its part in the big ecosystem.ii Starhawk, the author, finds the roots of an estranged worldview laid deep into our past, two millennia and more. In the Enlightenment, she tells us, the detachment of the divine and the mundane (from the Latin word mundus, meaning world) promoted by Christianity became what she calls the machine image, a very telling metaphor.iii In much(prenominal) a worldview, when we are told by William McDonough that he wants to build a structure like a tree, we find the statement odd ad perhaps even laughable. Trees are alive. Buldings arent. It seems so simple.I will transcend to that idea of a building like a tree. By now, you might be protesting to the invisible author me that you do connect yourself to nature, that you chew national parks, enjoy camping and hiking, perhaps even teach environmental Science classes. McDonough and his chemist cohort, Michael Braungart, wonder if it is all too easy to come out our reverance in the parking lots.iv Being designers, they take a look at less abstract demonstrations of the estranged worldview than does Starhawk (a Wiccan spiritual and ethical author), and they find it in the famed view that every middle management type is flavour to have from his corner office after the promotion.