The Cultural Basis for Our Environmental Crisis

In “The Cultural Basis for Our Environmental Crisis", Lewis Moncrief argues that the man has been modifying the natural world since the beginning. Besides, he claims that the democracy, technology, urbanization, increasing individual wealth, and an aggressive attitude toward nature give the impression to be in a straight line related to the current environmental problematic being challenged in the Western world. These revolutions around the world have helped to improve the quality of people’s life in terms of urbanization and infrastructure in other words, it aids people to live life more conveniently by allowing people to do more in less effort, but they have increased the pollution affecting the natural world, that is, the technology has produced some changes in the nature like erosion and endangered species habitat and generated some big problem on the environment such as global warming. Moreover, according to Moncrief there are three features which take part of this big problem impeding to get solutions to the ecological crisis: the lack of personal moral direction related to the ecological crisis, government and social institutions which are not adequate in order to achieve how people treat their natural surroundings; and the final one is the people’s abiding faith in technology that will help them tear any damage up or avoid any problems on the environment in the future. These characteristics show a kind of truth which deserves to analyze deeply. Finally, in this paper I will emphasis on the three features were proposed by Moncrief in order to give a critique against each one.