Sacred Nature

For most of human history nature was held to be sacred, and our God or gods were believed to be present everywhere in nature. That was true of almost all the world's cultures and religious traditions. When people in the West began to separate God and nature in the 17th century, it was not just a profound breach with thousands of years of accumulated wisdom and experience: it was also the root of how we have come to plunder the natural world and to promote our individual selves in unhealthy and destructive ways. Karen Armstrong argues that if we want to avert the looming environmental catastrophe, it is not enough to change our behaviour: we need to learn to think and feel differently about the natural world. She passionately believes that our religious heritage can teach us how to recover a spiritual bond with nature.