ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the claims that environmental problems have been the product of certain ideas, worldviews and attitudes. John Gray bewailed the influence of religious beliefs, in particular their association with further beliefs about the importance of human beings in comparison with the rest of the natural world. Feminist theories attempt to analyse women's oppression, its causes and consequences, and suggest strategies and directions for women's liberation. Deep ecological relationalism blames atomistic individualism as the origin of environmentally harmful attitudes and behaviours. Deep ecology and feminism, for example, have come into collision in spectacular ways. The critical theorists Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno saw Marx himself as representative of the problem of human alienation. Bureaucratic rationality, may be another factor to consider in explaining our contemporary domination of nature. In the Western philosophical tradition, women have been the target of misogynistic comments from antiquity to the present, where the supposed female closeness to emotion.
