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Abstract
What are the intellectual origins of the ecological crisis? Which approach can offer an alternative? In the first part of this paper, I argue that the crisis was caused not by faith in reason as such, but instead by distortions of reason. Further, I consider the intellectual prerequisites for ecological destruction, the ultimate cause of which can be seen in the transitional state of our civilisation from a dependent to an interdependent mode of interaction with the biosphere. A possible remedy to this can be the reconciliation of humankind with the biosphere by means of the Gestalt approach.
Notes
Contrary to this, Lomborg (Citation2001) claims that the current environmental destruction is not a crisis, because similar changes have already happened in the Earth's history (e.g. the Ice Age, giant meteorite impacts, etc.) without destroying the Earth. However, even though there is indeed no threat to the stability of the biosphere at a geological scale, there clearly is a threat at the human (local) scale. The very real danger that our species, Homo sapiens, may eventually become extinct as a consequence of environmental destruction should certainly be enough to characterise the current situation as a ‘crisis’ (Gould, Citation1994, p. 49; Foster, Citation1998, pp. 5–7). The ongoing environmental destruction, if not averted in the coming decades, will have irreversible consequences for the Earth's biosphere and humankind (White, Citation1967; Adam, Citation1993, p. 399; Buell, Citation1995, pp. 280–302; Harvey, Citation1996, p. 194).
This interaction between the noosphere and the biosphere brings to mind the relation between mind and body, which it seems to parallel. There is, however, a difference: the mind is a necessity for the human organism, while the noosphere is not a necessity for the biosphere. The mind has some control over voluntary body functions, which is not the case with the biosphere.
It was once believed that Amazonian Indians lived in peace and harmony with nature, but this bon-sauvage impression was changed after they obtained Western weapons and started to destroy their game (Goulding et al., Citation2000).
To realise how traumatic this alienation actually was, one has only to remember Blaise Pascal's image of a ‘thinking reed’, desperately lonely in an alien universe, whose infinity was only the infinity of strangeness (Pascal, Citation1995, p. 347).