Rethinking our relationship to nature

The climate change emergency has brought forward the need to rethink how we humans interact with the environment. Should we be allowed to extract natural resources from the earth to accommodate our energy needs? Should we cut down forests to plant vegetables or raise cattle? Should we use plastic packages and then throw them away in the sea? While technological advances provide sustainable ways to tackle such matters, any reply we give to these questions is also largely determined by how we understand our relation to nature. For any progress to be made around climate change, we have to re-address how we perceive (and should perceive) this relation. 

I say ‘re-address’ because even though climate change is a modern-day problem – perhaps even the defining issue of our times – philosophers have been questioning how humans relate to nature for quite some time. 

Scientific practice, being directly occupied with understanding nature, represents an extremely informative source to understand not only the practical ways humans interact with nature, but also the accepted norms that guide and restrict this relation. In particular, there is one scientific event that is taken to have greatly determined how humans treat the environment today: the Scientific Revolution.