Divorce In Nasr's The Problem

In the texts we’ve read and our subsequent discussions, the debate over the solution to our modern ecological crisis has compelled us to polarize the potential outcomes of holding different religious beliefs or worldviews. Specifically, we seem to believe that man must either worship nature or he will use it for personal gain only and exploit it endlessly. It can also be argued that Christian ideology sets us up in a position in which we are prone to the latter. In Nasr’s The Problem, he asserts that our divorce from religion in the dominant sphere is a cause of our ecological crisis. However, I dispute the idea that we must view nature as sacred in order for us to address its problems as well as the belief that Christianity invites us …show more content…
Nasr describes man’s problem with nature as “a disequilibrium... that threatens all man’s apparent victory over nature” (18)”. “Man’s apparent victory over nature” implies that man has won and nature has lost. Nasr’s discord with “man’s apparent victory” is that man should not be prideful of his selfish conquest over the Earth. It is a commonly upheld notion that no other creature before man has inflicted the sort of damage on Earth that he has. The implications are that human civilization is responsible for the destruction of the Earth and that man must now be held accountable and atone for his mistakes in the past. It is man’s undertaking to right our wrongs or otherwise apologize to nature for benefitting from its deterioration. When we employ this kind of dialogue in discussing nature, we unknowingly place the needs of mankind and the needs of nature at odds and even in direct conflict with each other. This means that there can be no outcome in which both man and nature prevail.

While I disagree with Nasr’s ultimate answer to our ecological crisis, I do agree with his diagnosis of the issue. He says that it is man’s “domination of nature” which has resulted in thoughtless destruction of our environment. Furthermore, he recognizes that the impact of man’s destruction of the environment has had negative effects on mankind as …show more content…
In biology, this is known as mutualism. Man is no longer the parasite of nature as identified earlier. We should destroy the concept that man has benefitted from the Earth’s deterioration, because he too will suffer and pay for the consequences. The ideal metaphor here is that the earth is a living creature with which humans have a symbiotic, mutualistic relationship. I disregard Nasr’s own metaphor for this relationship here because he is addressing the current state of affairs rather than the optimal.

In an optimal model for the relationship between human and nature, the gender assignments would be unproductive, if not bluntly anti-productive. The exploitation of females’ bodies and their work have been compared with the exploitation of nature to have many similar issues. A text titled “The Subsistence Perspective” by Maria Mies says that she “discovered during her investigation of women in a home-based industry in India the process of Hausfrauisierung (housewifeisation), by which women’s work under capitalism is universally made invisible and can for that reason be exploited