daily wisdom

We call out to policy and decision-makers to do something about the climate crises. Yet, regulations will very likely set us limitations that weren’t there before. When we act responsibly by ourselves, we wouldn’t need those regulations. When we don’t act responsibly, rules take that responsibility for us. It’s like a teenager who doesn’t need a curfew because she makes sure that she gets up for school no matter what vs. a teenager who can’t take responsibility for herself and cannot get up in the morning. Collectively, society acts like a teenager. It is time to grow up. 

When I understand that other beings nourish me, my response to their needs and my concern for what happens to them become the basis of my selfhood. I don’t take responsibility for the other, but I take responsibility for myself by caring for the other. When we understand that resources nourish us – that they are nourishment, not resources – we shift the focus from a functional perspective to one of joy. Nourishment attaches enjoyment to the fact of being alive.

“The common world is what we enter when we are born and what we leave behind when we die. It transcends our lifespan into past and future alike ; it was there before we came and will outlast our brief sojourn in it . It is what we have in common not only with those who live with us, but also with those who were here before and with those who will come after us. … Without this transcendence into a potential earthly immortality, no politics, strictly speaking, no common world and no public realm, is possible. 

We contemplate what is beautiful. We nourish ourselves on what is beautiful. When we lose this dimension of existence and kick out the beautiful for the functional, we end up in a crisis of taste. True nourishment combines the functional with the beautiful. Food should be tasty and healthy. Clothes should keep us warm and look beautiful. Our house should give us shelter and make us feel comfortable. The aesthetic dimension of life perfects the functional. 

Not eating meat: cool.

Buying second hand: cool.

Bringing your own jar: cool.

Not flying to incredible locations: somehow uncool.

What used to be uncool, became a trend. 

The pattern: those things that have become cool are those that can be marketed and sold. Zero waste has become a market. There are a bunch of products you can buy to go zero waste. The same goes for sustainable clothing. 

What’s cool and what’s uncool is defined by your surroundings and society. To break out of it is for the crazy ones. For the artists. For the courageous. 

The sensation of cold is not a simple event in my consciousness. Instead, you discover coldness through your relation to the cold. Without you, the cold wouldn’t be cold. Without the cold, you wouldn’t be experiencing cold. The cold has an objective existence in and of itself and its quality is there through you. For a polar bear, for example, the cold might be experienced as warmth. So the quality of cold is there because you experience it. And because it is different for everyone, we discover ourselves through this relation. Existence then comes into being through a dynamic network of relations. 

Our current systems serve their own needs instead of the needs of humans (and non-humans). Individual needs adapted to fulfill systematic needs. For example, because the economy needs to grow, we are encouraged to consume more and more. Our choices are no longer autonomous but rather dictated by experts who determine our behavior and preferences. We give up our individual needs for systematic needs. Illich calls this the era of systems.

Maybe it is part of our nature to serve the overarching system that we are part of. Ideally, our personal needs are in line with systematic needs. For example, just like the ecosystem benefits from reproduction, the individual (ideally) benefits from practicing reproduction. Today, the system is self-destructive and our needs are mostly unmet. Classic lose-lose situation.

What I miss most since staying home all day are surprises. I assume I am not alone with this. 

Without surprises, we are diminished of experiencing our existence. Because to experience ourselves, to be happy, we must be able to encounter the unexpected. Without the unexpected we are trapped in what Hegel refers to as the bad infinite, the unlimited and indefinite repetition of the same. It’s the unexpected that moves us to somewhere else. 

To live is to live from and to live with. We do not just live from animals (eg in the form of hamburgers), but we also live with animals. We do not just live with our pets, but with all animals that we share space with. Animals form a community with us, which imposes moral and political considerations of their rights on us. Animal rights are not limited to being protected from torture and maltreatment. Animal rights require that we ask ourselves 

•  how to create conditions that serve the well-being of a mixed community
• how to integrate the non-human world in political participative processes
• and how to allow them to live independently of us while among us.

World War II left us a legacy: the idea that more is better. Today’s economic practices reinforce this idea. But it’s not quantity that truly nourishes us, but quality. Quality has to be the discriminating criterion and replace our obsession with quantity.

When we focus on quality as nourishing us instead of quantity, plants and animals cease to be simple resources but instead become a source of nourishment that enlivens us. The result is a respectful co-being with others, past, present, and future. 

It is easy to idealize sustainable behavior as a purer, better way of being in the world. To use it as a way to inflate the ego and flatter vanity. Yet, we do not become a better person, because we act sustainably. All we do is respond to reality more adequately than how we currently respond do.

I walk down the street. It’s early morning and freezing cold. I pass the bakery that pulls their croissants out of the oven. My brain is still waking up, when I pass the street and almost get hit by a car. I sigh in relief. I am still here. 

I am immersed in a milieu that is both natural and artificial. The air, the food, the sights, the sounds, the smell. I feed myself from this milieu. Because I am still here, I am fed, I am nourished. The quality of nourishment emerges through what is given and through what we created. I am nourished because of what is given and because of what we created. I am well. I am still here. 

She says: The love of life is the joy of being. 

He says:  Life is loved. It is its own end in itself. 

I am always in relation to the other. In every relationship, I show up in a certain way. To other people, to my work, to the weather, to the world. As soon as I am, I am in the domain of ethics. Every thought I have, every move I make, has an ethical direction. Today I chose ambivalence. Tomorrow I might choose care. 

How do we get from the sense of being an autonomous individual to a sense of being embedded in a greater whole?

Step 1: We start with a cognitive process. We learn about our interconnectedness and understand that this makes much more sense than any idea of an autonomous individual. We are laughed at by our peers for being so naiv. 

Step 2: Although we are not really feeling it, we act like we are actually connected to the plants in our neighbours garden, to the homeless, to the eggs we eat. We make our peers curious. 

Step 3: We embody the wholeness. It’s our way of being. We got there through a deep process of immersive practices, like spending time in nature, intimate relationships, psychedelics. Our peers want to be us. 

Even if we make it only to step 2, we can already make quantum leap changes in how the world works. 

Not every painting, not every book, not every sculpture is a work of art. Art is art when it reveals something essential to the other. Life can be art. There is no distinct separation between art and life. If we let it, life reveals to us what is essential. We learn the art of living (Lebenskunst). 

Hedonism is not the absence of limits to our desires. Instead, it is the trust and confidence in them. When we lose this trust, we deny what it means to be human. We can reject desire, and we can fulfill desire. When we fulfill it, it brings us in relation with the world because it stimulates our senses. And only through our senses do we come into existence. The problem then is not hedonism that leads to unsustainabilty. Instead, it’s misdirected desires. For example, when we meet our desire for intimacy with ice cream (for me, preferably cookie dough ice cream). Hedonism can help us overcome unsustainability, when we reconnect to the real, underlying desires that stimulate our senses.

Hedonism, the search for more pleasure, has a bad rep. Nowadays, we are prompted to renounce hedonism and leave the hamster wheel. But hedonism can be something other than indulgence. Instead, it can point to the sweet taste of existence, incorporating the most complex sensations. It situates us in relation to what we take pleasure in. It links to the respect that we have for ourselves, other humans and nonhumans, the environment. 

A humanity that no longer takes pleasure in the other also no longer sees the harm it causes the other. It has no sense for the uglification of the world; it is ambivalent to the destruction of ecosystems; it exploits what is to exploit. The way out of the hamster wheel is not to deny pleasure but to fully embrace it. 

Our identity and the place we find ourselves at are in a reciprocal relationship: I participate in giving existence to the place and the place participates in giving an identity to me. 

When I walk my dog in the park, the park is different from when I use it to hang out with friends. The park’s physical characteristics (the climate, the air quality, the composition of the soil) and social aspects (like the way it is used) form a milieu*. Nature AND culture then constitute the milieu. The boundaries between these two dissolve. 

*This reciprocal relationship between place and person is studied in mesology, from Greek mesos (milieu) and logos (science). 

You take what was once abundant and free and curtail people’s access to it. You thereby create and maintain conditions of artificial scarcity. Private riches go up. Public wealth goes down. This is known as the Lauderdale Paradox.

For thousands of years, people were as familiar with insects, rivers, plants, animals and the soil as we are today with brands, apps and Netflix shows. All living beings were seen as interconnected and sharing the same essence or spirit. This way of seeing the world is called animism. For the Stoics, God and matter were synonymous. Not just beings, but matter itself was divine. 

With Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the father of modern science, this changed. Bacon called for the domination of nature. And Descartes – clever as he was – realised that we can only justify dominating nature, if it was rendered lifeless. He sliced humans and the rest of the world into two. This came to be known as dualism. And his theory of matter came to be known as a mechanical philosophy. 

This view allowed us to objectify everything non-human (beings and matter) and even other humans. It also allowed us to think of nature as something external. And because it’s external, we can exploit, destroy and marginalise her.

Our identities are built on assumptions like competition, rivalry, individuality. For a more beautiful world, we need to redefine our identity. I find one of the most important redefinitions is the idea of the autonomous individual. I am not a tree. But what would I be without a tree? And what would the tree be without the sun? The reason I am is because the tree is, is because the sun is. I emerge with the tree and the sun. I wouldn’t even be a meaningful concept without the tree and the sun. I emerge, I am, through the relationship with them. 

They can’t.

They play by the rules of the old system, yet we need a new system that obsoletes it. As long as they try to win not only at a dying game, but at a game that kills, they are not functional leaders.

How then can we ourselves become citizens for a more beautiful future?

By not participating in the dying game. If we still are, we can’t also claim to try to achieve anything meaningful. It sounds a bit harsh and it doesn’t mean that we need to opt out of society. It means that we – step by step – opt-out of inadequate mechanisms and participate in creating new ones. For ourselves personally and for society.

Let me rephrase this, because it’s important: we don’t opt-out of society, we participate in recreating it. 

If we are not able to find a way to deal, manage and cooperate with the person we like the least, the idea that we know how global conflicts can be resolved is just silly. 

It means learning a bunch of shit, that you probably don’t know yet and very likely hasn’t even been synthesised yet. It means adapting a warrior ethos while remembering that no war can be won. It means taking empowered responsibility; for everything. It means creating new pathways, as there are no instructional manuals from history. It means phase-shifting one’s identity, which is as a fundamental shift as the shift form single-celled to multi-cellular organisms. 

Do you have a sense of sort of “the end of the world is near”? 

If so, it’s not unusual. 

By default civilisations collapse. From the Ancient Rome to the Mayan empire. Collapses are usually caused by environmental causes and / or self-terminating mechanisms, like extracting all available resources. Our current system has a multitude of self-terminating mechanism built into it. What’s unprecedented is that we are now a global civilisation. We have an increasing capacity to make bigger choices. The influences we have increase. We operate in the same way that has always lead to collapse of civilisation. The underlying dynamics are not new to civilisation. Yet, the speed of process and the magnitude changed. But now, the collapse is exponential. Exponential extraction. Exponential pollution. Exponential disinformation. It’s existential. We thus need systems of governance, that no governance has ever done so far. 

When we look at personal health, we don’t just look at the liver, or just at the heart. We look at the whole human (ideally). Why then would it be different when we look at planetary health? 

Solutions are not found in dualisms like politics or grass root, activism or social business, environmental or social, old or new, indigenous or posthuman, meat or vegetables. The solution lies in addressing the whole. As no one human is able to do that, planetary health is a joint endeavour I which every action counts. 

How we make meaning of the world determines what we actually value. 

When we make meaning of the world through an economic lens, we are taught to value competition, rivalry, and scarcity. 

The lens changes, when it no longer functions in the sense that its capacity to explain the world  ceases in effectiveness and structures begin to crumble. 

A phase shift happens. 

A search for making meaning happens.

Chaos emerges, maybe even a war on meaning making (see the current polarisations). 

What the new looks like is open. To find meaning that makes sense and is conducive to personal and planetary health takes time, effort, endurance, and a curiosity about the undiscovered path. 

Actions towards sustainability are complex. They are subject to an endless variety of influences. 

A lot of systematic interventions are bullshit, as no one size fits all. Moreover, they make the whole very fragile: what if something that was implemented globally doesn’t work? The smaller the action, the less risks for the whole. 

If everyone was able to respond to the problems in their front yard while taking the broader perspective of how ones actions influence the rest, we wouldn’t need systematic interventions. 

In order to get there, we need to develop as humans: capacities such as recognizing our biases, thinking systematically while enabling ourselves to act placebased, emotion regulation to deal with all the annoying people we encounter when we try to take actions, being able to switch perspectives to understand annoying people…

Personal development is key to driving sustainble development.

Ecological systems don’t have problems in and of themselves. The problems are also – as I myself took it to be for a long time – not a mere problem of people’s ways of thinking and acting. The problems come into being by our intra-action with the ecological system. This means, that the system effects us in the same way we effect the system. Taking ourselves as the sole actors in this mess is a limited way of understanding the world. This doesn’t mean that we don’t need to take responsibility for what we think and do, but it means that we need to learn to understand and to become aware how the system intra-acts with us and how to respond to this. 

A democracy is not a a fixed or static structure of laws and regulations. Much more, it is a structure of relationships. It is a way of life.

The way of life it is pointing to is the way of life of an artist. Art is the creative expression of oneself. Oneself is mutually defined by the rest of the world.

Democracy therefore assumes that participation is necessary. In governing economic life as well as in political life. But democracy is not about learning to give up one’s interests for the sake of others. It is about learning to see one’s self – interests embedded in others ’ interests .

From concerns about environmental health and neighbourhood safety to effective schools and job security — none can be achieved by oneself. Each depends upon the needs of others being met as well as one’s own needs being met.

Democracy then is an ever – evolving relationship through which people solve common problems and meet deep human needs.

Yet, taking a position on anything to express those needs, even speaking out in the classroom or workplace, is a scary proposition for most of us. Therefore, democracy is a learned art. We are not born as citizens. Citizenship is an art. The tools to make art – and the tools we need to learn – are active listening, critical thinking, dialogue, embracing ambiguity, storytelling. 

Unless we address the issue of power – who is making the decisions – we can’t get to the roots of un-sustainabilty. Our society teaches us very little about how to share power. 

The very first step is to make our lives more consistent with what we value. Making our own choices, we overcome hopelessness by taking on more power for ourselves and for the impact of our choices in the world. We start (and don’t end) by changing ourselves. 

A) to die

B) not to die and to live

C) not to die and not to live. 

Many of us chose C. Being in a system that is not conducive to life, we manage to get around by zoning out. Preferably by shopping, drinking, distracting. The result is a society in which addiction is ordinary. 

Also, who else is not dead and not alive? Zombies

Research shows that the best predictor for one’s own behaviour is to watch what other do. This means that what you do also determines what others do. Even – as further research shows – to the degree that when you gain weight, others will, too. So when your spouse blames you for making them gain weight, they might actually be right. If you want to change the world, the most effective thing you can do is to change your own behaviour.

Important note: it’s not just tell, it’s not show don’t tell, but show and tell. Mere talking leads to what we find today: a lot of empty words without action, hypocrites. Keeping your actions to yourself misses the opportunity that others can copy. Talking about what you do not only allows those in your immediate surroundings to be led by example, but also those friendly other people on the internet.

“No matter where you go, there they are.”

The benefits: you know what you get, you can navigate easily, you have some certainty.

Just as too much certainty brings first boredom, then stagnation, then felt death, systems with little diversity first bring samedom, then stagnation, then death.

A key ecological principle is that systems thrive when in diversity. They also become anti-fragile through diversity. They also are, because of diversity.
When we create a world of sameness, we create a world of boredom and stagnation, determined to die.

Unfortunately, these words are not my own:

Well I have my rights, sir
And I’m telling you
 I intend to go on doing just what I do
And for your information you Lorax, I’m figuring
on biggering and biggering and biggering and biggering…
And at that very moment we heard a loud whack
From outside in the fields came a sickening smack
of an axe on a tree
Then we heard the tree fall
The very last Truffula tree of them all
(The Lorax, Dr. Seuss, 1971)

Aristotle (384–322 BC) took god as a rules over men. And men over anything else worldly: women, animals, plants, land.

René Descartes (1614–1616) separated our mind from our body “I think therefore I am”.

Isaac Newton (1667–1668) turned the world into a machine, assuming that it operates with mathematical precision and is predictable.

John Locke (1632 – 1704) helped promote the idea that unused land is wasted land.

Adam Smith (1723–1790) argued that the government should leave individuals alone to amass their material wealth, because what is good for the individual is eventually good for all.

The result is that we take humans to be separate from and superior to nature, which can be controlled and used for maximum material growth.

The famous problem of what was first “the hen or the egg?”also applies to transformation towards sustainability. Humans cause environmental problems through the systems and society we created. We created systems and society so we assume, that we can change them. But we are not the only ones who get a say in this. Systems and society also create us. They have their own agency.

There is no easy answer to “who was first us or the system?”. This becomes more apparent when we ask ourselves “who was first me or the system?”. One created the other. The egg and the hen are inseparable.

So when we want to transform system and society, we need to keep in mind, that they also need to want to transform. Just as we can’t change other people if they don’t want to themselves. We can’t change system and society, if they don’t want to. 

Ecological systems don’t have problems in and of themselves. The problems are also – as I myself took it to be for a long time – not a mere problem of people’s ways of thinking and acting. The problems come into being by our intra-action with the ecological system. This means, that the system effects us in the same way that we effect the system. Taking ourselves as the sole actors in this mess is a limited way of understanding the world. This doesn’t mean that we don’t need to take responsibility for what we think and do, but it means that we need to learn to understand and to become aware how the system intra-acts with us and how to respond to this.

Sustainable lifestyles imply that we take ourselves seriously.

Taking ourselves seriously means taking responsibility for how our individual life choices either sustain or challenge the un-sustainable practices in our society.

For many of us, materials seem limitless. But limitlessness is meaninglessness. Nature’s boundaries impregnate our life with meaning and a direction to make choices. 

Many people on their path of living sustainably don’t consider themselves to be part of a movement, but they strive individually towards a life that is in harmony with the needs and realities of the earth. Moving towards sustainability is a leaderless movement. One in which people take personal responsibility for the earth.

It is a symptom. The real problem is in the realm of our ontology – our theory of being. 

Our theory of being is based on dualist philosophies: the idea that we are separate beings. 

Most humans in history followed a very different theory of being. It can be referred to as relational. Relational ontologies see all beings as relatives. The rivers, the mountains, the owls. Being a relative to everything else, behaviour is fundamentally different. 

Next time you see an owl say Hi to your uncle.

Why the climate crises is a human crises.

The climate crises doesn’t exist. Even if temperatures rise up to 4 degrees, life on this planet will still flourish. Though with less humans flourishing. The climate crises is a human crises. It’s a result of what has changed the planet in ways nothing ever has before: the human mind. 

In contrast to my dog’s mind, the human mind lets us understand that our life is finite. It also lets us understand that life in itself doesn’t have meaning, despite the meaning we give it. Smart as we are, we therefore invented stories. Like religion and myth. They relieve us of this double-whopper pain that finiteness and meaninglessness bring along. The stories tell us that our true self is immortal. They tell us that we are part of a greater whole that endures our small (in)significant life. Often, these stories are contradictory. And often, they are based on mere beliefs which makes our need to defend them strong. Conflicts result. 

The dominating story humanity currently hangs on to goes like this: Technological progress lets us grow infinitely and each one of us can benefit from this growth. Unfortunately, infinite growth is tied to finite resources. Yet, this is the story that has given our lives meaning and helped us to make sense of the world. It unites us in one goal: strive for more and better. But as material growth hits a ceiling, so does our idea of giving this approach meaning. For many of us this story ceases to make sense. The idea of progress itself is starting to crumble. The meaninglessness of our actions contributing to the story reveals itself. Not only that the story doesn’t make us as happy as we hoped it would, it also destroys the planet. The climate crises then shows us that we actually have a crises in drawing meaning from the world as it is. The rise in depression and loneliness might be one indicator for this crises. 

Our response to the meaning crises

Our response to the meaning crises is the search for meaning elsewhere. Often, this leads us to a romanticised past and magical thinking. In the past, everything was beautiful and perfect and we lived in harmony with the more than human world. Peace, happiness, harmony. “Früher war alles besser”, as my imaginary grandpa used to say. “Everything was better in the past”. Whereas some want to regress to a pre-modern mode of living, it seems many more attempt to regress to pre-modern times of thinking, when gods and spirits were the way to go. New Age is the age to be. Instead of scientific reasoning and logic, they revive magical thinking*. Instead of god, they have the universe in which are all one. Although the common scientific approach – as we understand and use it thus far – is insufficient to understand the world, magical thinking is not helping either. There are some things we don’t know and probably never can. Leaving us with nothing and thus contributing to our inability to make sense of what’s going on. Whereas magical thinking tries to prove something that likely (most likely / maybe / probably / might / who knows if) does not exists, we do the exact opposite with the problems arising form growth and progress**. We try to un-see something that likely (very likely / for sure / clearly / obviously / everyone knows) DOES exist: the climate crises. 

Our response to the climate crises

Our response to the climate crises is to take the whole thing and to divide it in small, technocratic pieces. This way, we can ignore the root cause and deal with something that seems manageable, controllable, known. But the climate crises is multi-dimensional: the atmosphere, the biosphere and the microsphere all suffer at the same time. They are entangled and enforce each other. It’s very likely that all three have to be addressed at the same time to improve. Mechanical solutions that address only part of the problem might lead to even further problems. This has been seen again and agin, it’s what makes a complex system complex. We have no control of the side effects and often no idea about the tale risks. 

By focusing on partial endeavours, we can hold on to our meaning making: technology will fix it. We don’t have to question our way of living and being. We hold on to the illusion that we don’t need to change, pretending that infinite growth is no problem, that we don’t need a new meaning, because we can always have new technology. Some belief this. Many don’t. It’s dawning on us that it is an illusion. But by holding on to the idea pf progress, we also pretend that there is no need to question our way of being and thinking. That the root cause is merely physical and not meta-physical. That the meta-physical doesn’t need revision. 

A response to the human crises

When we recognise that the climate crises is actually a human crises, we can systematically search for possibilities of meaning and sense making. Many of us do this already on an individual level. But it is not an individual endeavour. It is a human endeavour that should be guided and be central to political and public discourse. A first step to do this is to acknowledge and to become aware that there actually is a meaning crises. To acknowledge that the physical is intertwined with the meta-physical. That our actions are guided by the stories that we belief. It’s where the physical meets the meta-physical. Where the psychological meets the practical. Where the individual meets the collective. It’s a possibility for humanity to stir us in a new direction. 

More practically, this means that we face reality as it is – climate change and all – and find useful ways to respond to it. Some might say that this is what we are doing already. But it’s not. The political and psychological effort we take to NOT act accordingly is huge. We are busy talking, theorising, making plans about how to respond to the climate crises. Instead of actually doing something, we waste our time and energy on outdated ideas. (1) The Age of Enlightenment has offered us mechanical solutions. Yet, despite ideas of green growth, we have not been able to prove yet, that more and forward can be achieved without an increase in resources. (2) Before Enlightenment – to speak simplistically – we had god. Yet, despite having beliefs, god hasn’t shown her face to us. 

Both responses are based on old ways of thinking. It is likely that we can find meaning in this world unrelated to materiality or magical thinking. But to get there, we have to first stop pretending that the current course makes sense. What the new story will be, no one can know.  

* This does not mean that spiritual phenomena don’t exist. Or that a greater power doesn’t exist. Fact is: we don’t know. Or at least I don’t.

**Progress can be understood in many ways. For example progress in ways of teaching. The way I use progress here, I refer to the common conception of progress tied to technological progress and it’s economic benefits.

 

We live in a complex world, which means that it’s full of ambiguity, contradiction and paradoxes. In order to understand the relations between these seemingly opposites, logic is not helpful. Logic – as we use it – is the idea that effect follows cause, that a definite right and wrong answer exists, that the only reason for ambiguity is a lack of knowledge and understanding. Instead of logical thought, we can use dialectical thinking, instead of decontextualising, we can view opposites embedded in a meaningful whole in which each element is only itself in relation to the other and therefore constantly changing and rearranging itself. A fly is only annoying when it’s in our face. 

By asking the most personal question like: 

where to we buy? What do we buy? what do we eat? How do we treat others? How do we treat our belonging? 

We are tied to the biggest questions. They tie us to the economic, political, social and ecological order of our whole planet. For example: Veganism is not the answer. Eating dairy and meat is not the cause of our problems. It is merely a symptom revealing how the world is organized, which incentives are given, how economical goals mess with other aspiration (like ending hunger or mitigating climate change). But if veganism is the entry point to asking what we can do to change the causes, it is the perfect answer. 

What we do is within our control. The personal is the political.

For thousands of years, people were as familiar with insects, rivers, plants, animals and the soil as we are today with brands, apps and Netflix shows. All living beings were seen as interconnected and sharing the same essence or spirit. This way of seeing the world is called animism. For the Stoics, God and matter were synonymous. Not just beings, but matter itself was divine. 

With Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the father of modern science, this changed. Bacon called for the domination of nature. And Descartes – clever as he was – realised that we can only justify to dominate nature, if it was rendered lifeless. He sliced humans and the rest of the world into two. This came to be known as dualism. And his theory of matter came to be known as a mechanical philosophy. 

This view allowed us to objectify everything non-human (beings and matter) and even other humans. It also allowed us to think of nature as something external. And because it’s external, we can exploit, destroy and marginalise her.