ABSTRACT
If I was to run around shouting ‘Me! Me! Me!’, I am sure you would soon get sick of me. Yet that is what humanity has essentially been doing over our recent history. Humanity has become self-obsessed. We tend to focus on ourselves, or at least the majority of us in Western society do. We focus on our society, our economy, and only lastly on the Nature that supports us. Even Green political parties fall into this trap. Now people love to pigeonhole other people and make camps of ‘them's and ‘us’, and this has been called one of the great problems of human nature (Diamond 1993; Ehrlich and Ornstein 2010). However, I do not seek to pigeon-hole people when I make an essential recognition of a ‘great divide's in terms of our worldview, ethics and values in how we think about Nature. I have come to understand over the years that there is a fundamental ‘great divide's within humanity: whether one believes in the intrinsic value of Nature. Anthropocentrism (also called homocentrism) regards humanity as the central element in the Universe; ecocentrism is instead focused on a Nature-centred system of values.
