ABSTRACT
Is care for the environment natural to humans? Or is it something wholly new to be learnt? Are there foundations to build on? Or must it be ‘taught’ as a ‘foreign language’?
For newborn children, the world is new: everything fascinating and wondrous. To Roszak, ‘The ecological unconscious is regenerated, as if it were a gift, in the newborn’s enchanted sense of the world’.1 Is this ingrained by countless generations of living amidst ‘nature’? Or is it just romantic sentimentality? Or is it both archetype and necessary? Widespread conscious understanding of ecological relationships and nature’s fragility is only recent. Aesthetic appreciation, and awe of nature, however, are found in all cultures in all (recorded) times.2 Jane Jacobs calls these ‘habitat-preserving traits’, essential to human survival. Had we, over millennia, just taken what we wanted, we wouldn’t now be here.3
