Читать книгу Natural Environments and Human Health - Alan W Ewert - Страница 25

The fourth stage began around the 14th century as humans transitioned from an agricultural, feudal, and barter economy toward an industrialized society. It is characterized by the split between science and the church, and movement toward capitalism, rationalization, and secularization. The people in the agricultural stage who turned to power, control, and violence entered the early modernity stage and basically split into two factions: one aligned with the church, and one aligned with the new science. Both factions viewed nature as a commodity.

Nature continued to be something to be cultivated and subdued, with an accompanying WorldView emerging that nature’s primary purpose was as the source of raw materials for growth. The 15th century saw the invention of the printing press, marking a huge difference in the way information could be distributed. Western imperialism burgeoned in the 16th century. The dominant scientific view was positivist, believing that there was one truth. Concurrent with these changes in the dominant scientific view was the rise of Western religion, though the connection between science and spirituality was severed by the time of the Renaissance.

Unlike the older spirit religions and Eastern religions, the Judeo-Christian WorldView holds humankind as being separate from and above nature (White, 1967; Simkins, 1994; Marten, 2001). Part of this belief system stems from the Judeo-Christian ideal that humans are similar to God because they are made in God’s image. While nature was still considered sacred by Christian religions—some aspects of the church such as Bible verses, hymns, and other writings praise nature—the worship of nature was rejected and replaced with the ideal of humans as the stewards and keepers of nature. The biblical cosmology of the creation story that emphasizes the task of humans to subdue nature and the anthropomorphic notion that humans stand above nature helped church followers see nature as subordinate. Some Christians interpret Genesis 1:28 passage of ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have domination over the fishes of the sea, over the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth’ to mean use and pollute. Pagans, druids, and other nature-affiliated groups of people were persecuted. Some factions of the church maligned nature as evil, wild, and something needing taming.

Copernicus went to jail for presenting a new model of the solar system with the Sun instead of the Earth at the center, symbolizing some of the tensions of the period. In the 17th century Descartes helped cement a mechanized view of the world, including nature, by describing the universe as a giant ‘clockwork’ with individual mechanical parts. This Cartesian view of the world as mechanistic influenced science to change from observing and experientially learning about nature intact as a system, as humans had done previously, to a mechanistic and reductionist enterprise with the primary purpose to control nature. Newtonian physics reinforced this separation by visualizing the universe as the interaction of billiard ball-like objects. The belief prevailed that matter is dead and inert—and that humans can rearrange it. Reductionism, along with binary and dichotomous thinking, became part of the dominant WorldView leaving us with the Newtonian–Cartesian mechanical model of reality, which championed rational objectivity instead of sympathetic intuitive understanding of nature and spirit. Westernized humans now had a firm perception of dominance, believing that if we can understand it mechanistically then we can control it.

During the agriculture stage people started living in larger settlements and therefore no longer developed their identity in small, close-knit, nomadic or semi-nomadic, tribal living conditions in which healthful attachment bonds to the mother and the symbolic mother—the Earth—were formed. Shepard (1995) and Chalquist (2013) argued that without these nourishing bonds humans remain in childish and adolescent confusion that includes not taking responsibility for the health of the earth or for each other. This immaturity, coupled with the inventions of potentially destructive technology, led to power and dominance as a base for many cultures’ WorldViews by the beginning of the industrial stage.

Life became more sedentary and wars more frequent. Medina (2008) talked about the human brain thinking better when people are physically moving. New research at Princeton shows that physical exercise reorganizes the brain to reduce the stress response (Schoenfeld et al., 2013). Exercise reduces anxiety, allowing the executive functions in the frontal lobe to work more reliably. Gould, who supervised Schoenfeld’s research, hypothesized that those early humans who were temporarily sedentary would have benefited by being more anxious; it would increase their avoidant behavior and possibly keep them out of harm’s way. However, as Western society generally became sedentary the lack of movement leading to anxiety has had more negative side-effects than benefits, possibly including more violence.

Wilderness has become a special aspect of nature. Nash (2001) describes the development of the Western view of wilderness as having its roots in a concern for survival and a desire and felt need for humans to control their environment. He postulates that for much of the history of civilization ‘wilderness’ was a place to be feared, as contrasted with paradise—a gentle, easily controlled pastoral environment where food could easily be grown and humans could feel safe from predators and environmental dangers. This view, informed to an extent by Christian ideals and extended by seemingly endless supplies of natural resources, guided the treatment of the New World by the European settlers. It wasn’t until the romantics in the late 18th century and the transcendentalists in the 19th century—both reactions against the rationalization of nature of the 17th century onward—that nature was again perceived by some Western people as aesthetically, culturally, and spiritually important.

The dominant WorldView about nature of the early modernity stage can be summarized as nature was to be used, cultivated, and subdued. Nature was seen as the source of raw materials for growth. Through Western expansion, and based on the Cartesian mechanistic model and Newtonian physics, people believed they could learn mechanistic functions and then control processes, including nature and people. The mechanical universe cosmological story evolved, embodying a world that runs like clockwork according to a set of physical laws, leading to the industrial age and ever-increasing pressure on natural resources. This pressure not only included increased use, but also reliance on the environment to absorb the polluting effects of industrialization.

Once again there were groups of people who continued the traditions of the sacred cycle stage including earthen spiritualities, animistic, and shamanistic traditions in which humans believe that they are integral with nature, sharing the same life essence.