More than 50 years ago, Science magazine published ‘The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis’ (March 1967), a paper by Lynn White, then professor of history at the University of California. The paper launched a controversy that still rumbles on today, over the vexed question of whether certain religious doctrines and beliefs of the western Christian world contributed to the formation of widely held attitudes to Nature that have resulted in the ecological crisis confronting us today.
White’s paper argued that “human ecology is deeply conditioned by beliefs about our nature and destiny – ...
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