“Was not their mistake once more bred of the life of slavery that they had been living?—a life which was always looking upon everything, except mankind, animate and inanimate—‘nature,’ as people used to call it—as one thing, and mankind as another, it was natural to people thinking in this way, that they should try to make ‘nature’ their slave, since they thought ‘nature’ was something outside them” — William Morris
3 comments:
If only more ecologists read Viz.....
Guessing you're not endorsing this comic? It's a minor point I suppose that there was no large scale eschatological expectation in 1310 like, say, in 1000 (supposedly). More important, the medieval Xian eschaton differs radically from the environmental eschaton: the former destroys the world and rescues humans; the latter destroys most life, including humans, and then sees the world find its balance again.
...though I suppose if medieval and modern expectations of world catastrophe have anything in common, it's the belief that something right has been harmed by human agency and that the catastrophe will repair that harm. Part of a larger belief in symmetry and balance.
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