ABSTRACT
Human beings and all their activities are part of a system which is sometimes simply called ‘nature’. This universal nature is more general and comprehensive in its meaning than nature in our common language, which relates to the abundant and complex phenomena on the surface of our planet (earth, water, atmosphere, plants and animals), and even more, with a somewhat romantic touch, to its virgin form before man 1 intruded on it. Defined in this more restricted sense, nature stands in contrast to culture and human civilization. Nature and culture appear as adversaries in a zero-sum-game where the flourishing of the one necessarily implies the suffering of the other. The relationship is viewed as a continuous struggle for dominance. In the past, nature was perceived as a stronger, impressive and unpredictable power to which mankind had to submit for survival. His rational abilities, however, enabled man to gather experience, to penetrate into the secrets of nature, to develop particular skills, to build up his culture. He discovered numerous ways to employ the laws of nature to his own advantage. Beginning, roughly, with the Renaissance, Western man, as the ‘crown of creation’ embarked on a voyage to free himself from nature and his great successes on this voyage led him to the arrogant attitude of posing as nature’s master, to enslave it, to regard it merely as a big quarry for his own shortsighted benefit, rather than-what it actually is-as a foundation and the nourishing support for his own existence. It is this anthro-pocentric attitude which makes Western man talk of nature as ‘our environment’, ie nature as merely a general passive arena for his actions. The consequences of this world-view for co-existing civilisations, ie colonialism, is discussed in other chapters of this book (eg Chapter 6 by Amalric and Banuri).
