This essay examines the deep cultural and philosophical roots of Western civilization's estrangement from the natural environment. Drawing on thinkers including David Abram, Henry David Thoreau, Bill McKibben, and Charles Siebert, the paper argues that Greco-Roman rationalism, Judeo-Christian anthropocentrism, and the advent of alphabetic writing have collectively distanced humans from their ecological context. The essay traces how these forces have produced a worldview in which nature is objectified, controlled, and exploited rather than inhabited. It concludes that unlimited economic growth and consumerist culture are the inevitable — and unsustainable — expressions of this alienation, posing existential threats to both the environment and human civilization itself.
Western civilization is currently coming to terms with some very important and unsettling realities. Capitalism, and modern economic thinkers, have idolized economic growth without limit. In most economic textbooks and theories, economic growth is considered an end good, and a lack of economic growth a problem.
Though we can argue about whether economic growth is beneficial in all situations, it is indisputable that economic growth has natural limits — limits created by our own natural environment. For this reason, the culture of more that dominates Western civilization and drives our collective reasoning is not sustainable.
The effect of Western industrial capitalist civilization on the environment has been enormous. Western culture, driven by an ethic of individualism and materialism and empowered by science and technology, has done irreversible damage to the natural environment and continues to do so. The environmental challenges that now face the world are tremendous, serious, and a threat to human existence.
Thesis: Our view of ourselves as separate from our environment is what promotes our sense of self-centeredness and alienation. Furthermore, it prevents us from peacefully existing within our environment because we see it as both a threat and a resource for our own survival, causing us to strip the natural world in order to forestall natural processes we find unpleasant.
Greco-Roman philosophy elevated the use of reason over the use of the senses. This has cultivated an adversarial relationship with the environment. The distrust and contempt of sensory experience — through which our natural environment is directly engaged — has led to a distancing from, and neglect of, the environment. This attitude was compounded two millennia later during the Enlightenment, when René Descartes separated mind from matter, a distinction that has shaped scientific inquiry ever since.
The Judeo-Christian worldview, which dominated the West after the Greco-Roman period, has cultivated a similarly adversarial relationship with the environment. It instructs man to populate the earth and gain dominion over it and all the creatures in it. This has instilled a sense of superiority and self-centeredness in humans as the species made in the image of the Creator (Sessions, 3).
Christianity's promise of peace in the afterlife has intensified the neglect of this world by placing human destiny in another realm. The secularization of Western civilization has discredited this promise but has not replaced it with a more compelling vision of fulfillment. Its most compelling substitute is fulfillment through the possession and enjoyment of more material things — consumerism. Nor has secularization diminished the self-centeredness of humans, sometimes known as anthropocentrism (Sessions, 3). The environment and most of the creatures in it are still seen as threatening — things to be controlled and tamed rather than respected and acquiesced in (Sessions, 3).
A culture's use of language has a tremendous influence on its worldview. David Abram believes that in modern Western civilization, individuals are profoundly distanced from their natural environment. The sources of this alienation — the Judeo-Christian tradition and the Greco-Roman tradition — very far apart in many respects, converge on one key aspect: their common roots in alphabetic writing (Abram, 94).
Abram believes that the development of the alphabet opened a "new distance between human culture and the rest of nature" (Abram, 100). He theorizes that in an alphabet system, "the written character no longer refers us to any sensible phenomenon out in the world, but solely to a gesture made by the human mouth" (Abram, 100). This new focus causes a "shift away from the sensible phenomenon which previously called for the spoken utterance, to the shape of the utterance itself, now invoked directly by the written character" (Abram, 100).
This shift in focus creates a new channel between human utterances and human-made signs. Abram observes that "a direct association is established between the pictorial sign and the vocal gesture, for the first time completely bypassing the thing pictured" (Abram, 100–101). He points out that natural objects are no longer a necessary part of the equation in this new channel of communication, leading to a neglect of the "larger, more-than-human life world" (Abram, 101).
Abram contrasts the alphabet with the more primordial method of the pictograph. He compares the reading of Chinese pictograms with a hunter's reading of traces left in nature by prey, observing that "we read those traces with organs honed over millennia by our tribal ancestors" (Abram, 96). Abram notes that a pictograph displaces "our sensory participation from the depths of the animate environment to the flat surface of our walls, of clay tablets, of the sheet of papyrus" (Abram, 100). However, "the written images themselves often related us back to the other animals and the environing earth," because our representation of animals and nature in pictograms expressed a desire to connect with those objects (Abram, 96). Subsequent readings of these pictographs reinforced this connection with the things of nature, which the Chinese refer to as the "ten-thousand things."
"Abstractions replacing lived reality and Thoreau's critique"
"Nature documentaries as evidence of human separation from nature"
"Global warming and environmental destruction driven by neglect"
The gravity of the threats facing mankind has been recognized by most. However, only a portion of these people recognize the root cause of these threats and the natural fruition of those roots. This is the recognition that our relationship with nature — being dysfunctional — will eventually come to an end, and that without a fundamental shift in how Western culture understands its place within the natural world, the consequences will be irreversible.
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