costs of goods and services, place any value on ecosystem services, or respect nature and basic ecological principles, resulting in a market that provides misleading information to economic decision makers. The incredible growth manifested in the US during a few short decades (100% growth in years, rather than millennia) led to a turbulent decade in the 1970s in which rivers caught fire, cities became thick with smog, and dependence on foreign oil shocked our economy (McKibben, 2007). Nature was reaching carrying capacity for many pollutants, motivating the first calls for limits to growth including E.F. Schumacher’s (2009) Small is Beautiful. These clarion calls were quickly eclipsed by the political will of the 1980s and 1990s during which economic growth once again took center stage.
During the 19th and 20th centuries education was adjusted to align with the philosophy and perceived needs of the economic market. With the Industrial Revolution came the need to train the population en masse ‘to perform as parts of machines – with precise, repetitive, mind-numbing action’ (Ackoff and Greenberg, 2008). Achieving success with the pursuit of industrialization required that children receive compulsory mass schooling intended to prepare them to be obedient parts of the new economic engine. The resulting mechanistic approach to education paralleled the increasingly mechanistic view of the world (Sterling, 2001).
In large part resulting from the above economic and educational paradigms, the dominant Western cultural narrative or WorldView has become one in which everyone could and should pursue the acquisition of material wealth as the pathway to happiness and freedom. A pervasive narrative has been created that people are separate from one another and the rest of the natural world and that the purpose of life is to primarily serve individual interests. Playing into the humans-are-separate-from-nature narrative was the fact that a transition from rural to urban environments meant that fewer people in the US lived in rural areas, therefore fewer people had nature as a large part of their everyday lives.
In summary, nature continued to be seen as the source of raw materials for growth, a commodity. Capitalist economies externalized environmental costs. Western people saw themselves as separate and above nature. Beginning in the late 1800s, a subculture of nature romanticism developed in Western cultures including authors Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. By the 1900s scientists and writers like Ellen Swallow Richards, Florence Nightingale, and Rachel Carson were expressing the importance of the interface of nature and human health, encouraging people in politics and at home to clean up the environmental pollution as well as take time to experience the beauty and awe of nature. There were people who believed it was important for children to be outside, resulting in the recreation movement to help children have safe outdoor play environments. The mechanical universe cosmological story prevailed in Western economies and was exported to as many cultures as were receptive. Many pockets of indigenous people continued their reciprocal relationship with nature; however, many were simply overrun by the industrial machine.
Technological stage
In the US the last 100 years have seen the beginning of the technology age and changes in society that hugely diminish the time people spend in contact with nature. By 1900 only 40% of US households lived on farms and by 1990, 1.9%. By the late 19th century technology was in place to transmit electrical current on a widespread basis. In 1882 the first central power plant was built in Manhattan providing light to about 500 homes. Technology for light spread rapidly and by 1895 a large-scale power plant was in place at Niagara Falls, replacing Edison’s direct current system with alternating current more efficient for longdistance transmission. The ubiquitous availability of electric light reduced people’s need to synchronize their activities with natural day and night rhythms, creating another physical separation from nature.
The evolution of manufacturing and technology has allowed us to control things that were once deemed uncontrollable. In the not-too-distant past, a society’s livelihood may have depended on local rainfall. Now, not only do we have the ability to ship foods and goods all around the world, effectively making up for poor weather conditions in certain areas, but we even have the technology to actually make it rain through cloud seeding and other techniques. While much of these technologies have enabled us to live healthier, longer lives, they have also had the important side-effect of radically changing our interaction with the world around us.
In 1992 the average US household made 2.3 trips to the grocery store weekly averaging 35–40 minutes each, which equates to 4.3 days per year spent food shopping; in contrast our ancestors in the Paleolithic Age are thought to have spent about 20 hours per week or 85 days per year securing food—while leaving significant time for shelter building and perhaps leisure. This lack of attention on food gathering takes our consciousness away from nature and with it our connection with nature. Many people feel alienated from nature and part of that comes from our separation or lack of knowledge about where our food comes from. While we have more food choices than ever in the US and other developed countries, we have less understanding and physical, emotional, and spiritual connection to food, including food gathering, food cultivation, animal killing, and processing.
This sixth shift, from the Industrial Revolution to a technical revolution, has occurred in a relatively short period of time. Now humans are able to live entire lifetimes seemingly without having to encounter nature. Exceptions to this isolation often occur only in the midst of natural disasters such as earthquakes, fires, tornadoes, hurricanes, flooding, mudslides, rock fall, and tidal waves and tsunamis. Considering the impact such encounters imprint on those who experience them, it is not surprising that many people have a reaction of pervasive fear and mistrust of the natural world (Mitten and Woodruff, 2009). Another effect of the distance from the natural environment that technology exacerbates is that humans are further removed than ever before in history from the consequences of their actions on natural systems. This leads to a vicious cycle of dramatic human-caused changes to the natural systems, more natural disasters, and a buildup of negative health consequences because of our self-polluted living environment. The outcome is a web of crises fueled by our nearpathological pursuit of technological fixes that has brought human civilization to the brink of collapse.
From the first binary programmable computer in the late 1930s to the iPhone today and who knows what tomorrow, technology has altered culture. The transition in birthing practices over time is indicative of a larger cultural shift in which science and technology have become revered above natural processes. By the mid-1900s most hospitals had become sterile, often large complexes more concerned with efficiency and cost rather than patient satisfaction. Outdoor terraces and balconies disappeared and parking lots replaced natural areas (Malkin, 1992; Ulrich, 1992; Ulrich and Parsons, 1992; Horsburgh, 1995).
In June 2013 the American Medical Association labeled obesity a disease, and in doing so went against the recommendation of its own council on Science and Public Health. The human body is adapted to storing extra calories as fat; eating more calories than needed and then gaining weight is normal. Labeling obesity a disease is a signal of how far we have distanced ourselves from natural processes and from taking responsibility for lifestyle choices. We are now in a place where we have to consciously try to connect with the natural environment rather than it being something that happens on a daily basis.
The Wilderness Act of 1964 and the wilderness movement illustrated that even when humans wanted to go into the wilderness they thought of themselves as separate. Wilderness is defined by the Wilderness Act of 1964 as a place where ‘man’ [sic] is separate: ‘A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his own works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain’ (Anon., 1964, section 2(c)). The principal author Howard Zahniser, along with John Muir and other prominent preservationists of the time were working within the dominant WorldView of nature being separate from humans, and thus acting to preserve and protect the natural environment by keeping it separate from human civilization. This view of nature came from the same dominant and separate perspective of people who believed that nature was intended for human use and wanted to consume it as natural resources for growth.
