movement retain this separate from nature view. Rather than conceiving ourselves as part of the ecosystem, we see ourselves as living outside it and modifying our behavior—recycling, turning down thermostats, eating local, and installing compact florescent light bulbs—to ‘save’ the environment.
Our current WorldView or paradigm, characterized by anthropocentrism, materialism, and alienation from nature, has resulted in humans leaving a clear and unique record in the Earth’s geologic history, causing some geologists to label this historic period the Anthropocene (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000). While most epochs have lasted millions of years (the Mesozoic lasted for hundreds of millions of years; the Eocene and others lasted more than 20 million years), the most recent period, the Holocene, has lasted 11,000 years, approximately since the end of the last Ice Age. The significant human-driven processes—including nitrogen pollution (humans now synthetically fix more nitrogen than is fixed by all the world’s ocean and land plants, including ocean acidification), overfishing, patterns of consumption, and population growth, that are likely to have lasting effects for tens of millions of years—have influenced the jump to a possible new epoch, the Anthropocene (Zalasiewicz et al., 2008). Zalasiewicz et al. (2011) note that George Perkins Marsh addressed the anthropogenic global change in Man and Nature published in 1864 and in the 1870s Italian geologist, Antonio Stoppani, used ‘Anthropozoic’ to label the transformation caused by humans. While geologists are slow to embrace change, the term Anthropocene was adopted relatively quickly after Paul Crutzen (one of three chemists who shared the 1995 Nobel Prize for discovering the effects of ozone-depleting compounds) and Eugene Stoermer (2000) used the term Anthropocene in an article published by the International Geosphere–Biosphere Programme (IGBP).
Geologists will not be quick to pin down an Anthropocene epoch dates. This entry into a new geologic period, demonstrated by humans’ record left on Earth and in particular the stratigraphic record, is especially evident since the onset of the Industrial Revolution (Connor, 2010) and analyses of air trapped in polar ice showed the beginning of global changes in concentrations of carbon dioxide and methane from the late 1800s. Other scientists say the Anthropocene might not begin for up to 50 years from now because future changes may dwarf our current changes. This dialogue is useful in terms of bringing to light the deep impact humans have on Earth, leaving a unique and clear record, though the actual reality of the change and delineation of epochs will be more precise in retrospect, perhaps 100 years in the future or more.
The impact of the last three of these six major shifts in the dominant WorldView of nature has been to reinforce a perceived disconnection of people from the natural world, as well as to reinforce a value of manufactured and non-nature-based goods, including pharmaceuticals and foods that have replaced nature-based goods. Humans’ dependency on fossil fuels comes to light as we extract oil from more difficult sources and transport it over greater distances, risking and causing greater and greater environmental disasters.
As shown by imaging, what humans do in their physical life impacts the neuronal configuration of their brains. The change to an agrarian lifestyle, then to an industrial lifestyle and then to a technology lifestyle, and the associated increased sedentary nature has changed the brain; however, it may not be in our best interests. Neural mechanisms guide our social relationships, including motivation and drive, reward and prediction, perception and memory, impulse control and decision making. As beliefs get inculcated into the culture, newborn members grow up learning the new behaviors and beliefs, not knowing other options. Thus, the new WorldViews become ingrained. In this manner the mechanical universe cosmological story continues to prevail in the technological stage, combined with the regenerative universe story believed by some.
The subculture in the industrial stage, which emphasized the need to clean and preserve the environment for human health and wellness continued into the technology stage. There are many small groups of people now working for more connection with the Earth and a sustainable future. Early in the technology stage, Aldo Leopold (1966) questioned the sentiment of humans as conquerors of nature and wrote in his famous Land Ethic that the land and all of its parts, including humankind, should be considered as members of the same community. Leopold did not oppose the wilderness concept, but rather saw it as a means of preserving the art and skill of travel and wilderness recreation, as a scientific laboratory, and as a reserve for wildlife. This was another indication of a movement in the US seeking to reunite humans with the natural environment and recognizing the importance of nature to the health and well-being of humankind.
Even today many indigenous people live in harmony with nature and natural landforms and have kept the knowledge of this mutual dependency between nature and humans at the forefront of their culture. Some Native Americans, flying in the face of a materialistic culture, continue the tradition of potlach or gift-giving festival, though this practice has been made illegal in Canada and the US. A number of aboriginal populations continue to use initiation or rite-of-passage ceremonies, used for thousands of years, to aid in healthy development and maturation. A study about health promotion and illness prevention in Chinese elders revealed that the elders today continue to believe ‘conformity with nature’ is the key to health and wellness (Yeou-Lan, 1996). In Scandinavian history the importance of nature, popularized by Ibsen with the concept of friluftsliv, Naess with the concept of deep ecology, and others, continues to be strong. More recently, beginning in the mid-20th century many practitioners of outdoor and environmental education, worldwide, have understood the value of being outdoors and have educated people about the natural environment and environmental ethics. Even within dominant cultures, like the US where many people live most of their lives disassociated from nature, numerous folks still spend time outside learning wilderness living and traveling skills (see Jon Young and Wilderness Awareness school; for an historical account of women learning and traveling in the outdoors see Mitten and Woodruff, 2009).
The Resultant Perception of Disconnection from Nature in Western Cultures: Where Are We Today?
As we can see from the first part of this chapter, for over 95% of the time that Homo sapiens has been on Earth humans have lived in direct interrelationship with the rest of the natural world and probably understood that they depended on nature (Oelschlaeger, 1991; Glendinning, 1995; Suzuki, 2007; Young et al., 2008). Early people may have been guided by Flinders’ (2002/2003) values-of-belonging, perceiving that everything in nature is connected. This perception of connectedness aligns with the WorldView of many past and present indigenous populations who follow the seasons, time activities to the blooming of certain flowers and the rising and setting of the sun, and eat foods that are grown, caught, or hunted locally. In the sacred cycles stage there literally was on-the-ground evidence illustrating a WorldView where humans considered themselves integral with nature and sharing the same life essence.
However, for some humans during the agricultural stage as they defined accumulation of material goods, including food, and the physical symbolic representations of their spiritual beliefs as wealth, they significantly changed their view of nature as ‘other’. During this major shift in their paradigm humans also started engaging in warfare. Fortunately, there was enough space that many cultures continued to live close to the earth guided by the values-of-belonging, and there is evidence that not everyone reacts with a scarcity consciousness that leads to war (see Box 2.2).
Over time the paradigm of competition and dominance was used by many people in the Western world and was starkly manifested when the Judeo-Christian religions preached nature as other and as beneath humans and god. Like a runaway train, this WorldView of superiority of humanity over nature continued during the industrial and technological revolutions. Nature became a commodity and over-indulgences a theme. Beginning with the Industrial Revolution at the end of the 18th century, people became the dominant force of change to the Earth’s systems. Meanwhile, under-consumption is a crisis for the billions of people around the world whose lives are oppressed by other peoples’ material consumption, which has another set of complex social, economic, and ecological impacts.
Swan
