ABSTRACT
Do we still need the idea of ‘the sacred’? It is often suggested that one
area in which we need to retain such language is that of our relation-
ship to the natural world. We should not, it is said, regard nature merely
as something to be manipulated for our own human purposes, but as
something to be respected in its own right, and talk of nature as ‘sacred’
is thought to be an appropriate way of expressing this idea. In this
chapter I shall give due weight to such concerns, but I shall argue that
there are other and better ways of capturing the kind of value which we
can and should attribute to the natural world.
