Fwd: The Christian roots of our ecological crisis

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From: Capt

http://indiafacts.co.in/christian-roots-ecological-crisis/

Since the roots of our trouble are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not.

23-06-2015

Prof White was a historian of medieval Christianity who conjectured that Christian influence in the Middle Ages was the root cause of the ecological crisis in the 20th century. He gave a lecture on December 26, 1966, called "The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis" at the Washington meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, that was later published in the journal Science. White's article was based on the premise that "all forms of life modify their context," that is, we all create change in our environment. His ideas were considered by some to be a direct attack on Christianity and set off an extended debate about the role of religion in creating and sustaining the West's destructive attitude towards—and exploitation of—the natural world. — Editor

A conversation with Aldous Huxley not infrequently put one at the receiving end of an unforgettable monologue. About a year before his lamented death he was discoursing on a favorite topic: Man's unnatural treatment of nature and its sad results. To illustrate his point he told how, during the previous summer, he had returned to a little valley in England where he had spent many happy months as a child. Once it had been composed of delightful grassy glades; now it was becoming overgrown with unsightly brush because the rabbits that formerly kept such growth under control had largely succumbed to a disease, myxomatosis, that was deliberately introduced by the local farmers to reduce the rabbits' destruction of crops. Being something of a Philistine, I could be silent no longer, even in the interests of great rhetoric. I interrupted to point out that the rabbit itself had been brought as a domestic animal to England in 1176, presumably to improve the protein diet of the peasantry.

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