ABSTRACT
The Western agricultural system played out in producing our environmental situation. The whole dynamic of Western environmental thought has been caused by these conflicting views. Clarence Glacken, in his magistral summary of Western civilization's attitudes toward nature, does not clearly separate these different worldviews. the two forms a constantly braiding and rebraiding channel in Western history. The small mixed farm apparently owes its long career in the Western world to the logic of production; we know it from ancient Canaan, Greece, and Rome. Northern Europe, and probably all of Europe, had in ancient times a variant of the Old Northern view. Even in the old agrarian empires, the new economic world distanced people from nature, reduced nature worship, and led to the rise of high godsa quite literal rise, for they went off to the sky, increasingly banished from the immanent world of springs, mountains, and fields.
