Relationship Between Worldview And Environmental Behavior

I believe that there is a direct relationship between a society’s shared worldview and its environmental behavior. A worldview is defined by the Oxford American Dictionary as a philosophy of life or particular conception of the world. Societies have held a variety of different worldviews overtime, in different regions, and among various groups. These include traditional ecological practices and indigenous ways of knowing, eastern polytheistic religions, to a western, human-dominated view of the world in regards to practices of resource acquisition, agriculture, and the human-environment relationship, these various worldviews have demonstrated a distinct difference in behavior based on the worldview of that population. By evaluating the societies in which these …show more content…
As shown by the indigenous and traditional ecological knowledge of the Abenaki Indians, Lynn White’s argument as Christianity being the root of the ecological crisis, and the practices held by followers of polytheistic religions, a society’s shared worldview drives the actions, practices, and values of the human-environment relationship.
A society’s shared worldview is deeply rooted in its culture; the meanings, behaviors, and symbols that define a group’s way of life. An example of such cultural values is seen within the Abenaki Indians. The Abenaki are a group of people from the northern New England and southeastern Canadian regions. Their view of the world is very deeply rooted in traditional ecological knowledge, which is defined by Fikret Berkes in his article “Religious Traditions and Biodiversity” as a cumulative body of knowledge evolving by adaptive processes handed down through the generations about