The Modern Divorce Between Nature and Culture

The modern era is when Europeans definitely perceived themselves as beings apart from nature. Not only separated but also superior, capable to control it. Nature then becomes the ‘other’, the ‘not-I’ that one does not dialogue with, an entity humans relate with either as an obstacle or a commodity. This chapter discusses to which extent this is related to the developments of modern science and Humanism, industrialisation and the French Revolution. One of the major contradictions of these times is that not only the increasing sophistication of science, technology and philosophical thought were unable to avoid multiple planetary crises, but were actually partly responsible for them. The outcome arrived in the shape of the Anthropocene. Concerns with the state of nature led to the emergence of the notion of ‘wilderness’, which was followed by environmentalism as a social movement. Philosophers increasingly valued intuition and embraced holism as opposed to reductionism. Belatedly, science also increasingly shifted towards a holistic perspective. Sustainability science is a symptom of that and it emerged from the convergence of natural sciences, social sciences and other fields of knowledge.