The historical, philosophical, cultural and religous reasons for our ecological crisis.

All forms of life modify their contexts. Mankind is one of the few species that have the ability to change their environment. Many ecologies around the world have been profoundly changed by the spread, growth and decline of civilisations. Mans impact on the environment has increased exponentially and species are now dissapearing many times faster than they were before the evolution of humans. What has been called an eco-catastropic apocalypse has been occuring over America and the developed world in recent years since the Industrial Revolution. The cause of the current mass extinction is human expansion. The lush natural world into which humans evolved and developed is being replaced with barren green deserts and largely prosthetic environments. If the currant rate of extinctions continues our children will be practically alone in the world. Humanity is leaving the Cenozoic, the Age of Mamals, and entering the Eremozoic, the Age of Solitude.
The earth has become merely a mass of resources for mankind to exploit and experiment with as we please. Attempts to control nature led to the Dust Bowl and other engineered famines of the 1930's and the rise and downfall of the Soviet Union. Secular ideologies have been committing vast ecological crimes in the pursuit of heaven on earth. It is a relic of the Enlightenment faith that a new world can be created using human will and science. Organic pesticides such as DDT, ALdrin and Diedrin were introduced after World War II. They were successful at controling pests but this success constitutes a threat to both wildlife and human health. Agricultural scientists said that these pesticides promised Utopian dreams and would change the world for the better. Man has affected his environment since the earliest days of civilisation. The banks of the Nile river has been irrigated and turned from African swamps into pleasant pasture; the Netherlands have expanded into the North Sea; the invention of the car has cut down the sparrow population that used to feed on horse manure; mass extinctions are now become commonplace. The rabbit, which is not native to Britain, was introduced in 1176 to supplement the Normans diet. When the rabbit population began to grow out of porpotion Myxomatosis was introduced to curb the population. The rabbits are effective clearer's of weeds and plants and this led to a growth of grassland and bushes in areas normally cleared out by rabbits.     
Animism proclaimed the spirituality equality of man and nature. Everything in nature had a spirit which must be placated before man had any impact on that particular spirits home. The exploitation of nature was stopped before it even occurred because the spirits had to be kept placated. Saints were in effect substituted for these spirits but they were necessarily absent from nature and separate from physical nature. They existed in heaven or mans world. Spirits were no longer to be found in nature which meant it could be used to mans pleasure.
Western Christianity believes that nature assumes spirits in nature and is therefore heretical and idolatrous. It believes that nature exists to serve man. North European pagans had a control over nature. The spirits obeyed man.
With the spread of Christianity the belief that man was in control of nature was formed. This belief was taken from Genesis and when Adam first named the animals. This was not just an act of naming; it was an act of dominance. Man was asserting his control over nature. God originally made Adam of, and in nature but he asserted his separation from nature with this act of domination. Man became the master of nature. Humans were unique among animals because they were created in the image of God and God created man to be transcendent over nature. This has passed on into all areas of socio-cultural political ideology as the dualism of man forever separated from nature. This dualism allows man to legitimately exploit nature for their own needs.
To the early Christians nature was seen as a symbolic system through which God instructs man. Nature was artistic rather than scientific. All attempts to understand it were based on metaphor rather then science. There was a metaphor in all natural things that man can learn from that God has specially designed to lead man to transcendence. In the early Eastern world there was an art to the world and religion was a way to understand it. It didn't try and understand nature, it tried to understand man through nature. Nature was in this sense revered and respected. This was the system of thought that became science in early Middle Eastern, Latin, Roman and Greek Jeudeo-Christian societies. To them man was separate from nature, but nature was important to mans spirituality. It was not a European system of beliefs and did not pass on to the European Christian societies. Darwin tried to put us back into nature with the theory of evolution, which places man as an animal.
Something came out in the Christianity from Northern Europe that has now spread to dominance over most forms of Christianity. Mans control over nature and mans God ordained a separation from nature. All forms of Protestantism political ideologies share this. Knowledge means power. Religion promised that a day would come when no would have died in vain. Through religion and with the love of God is the only way that this state could be achieved. Now the majority of man believes that by using the power of science man can bring about it himself.
There is a system of beliefs dating from pre-history that has continued to be passed on through subsequent generations that has appeared in various forms. It is an inherently Northern European system of beliefs that has taken root in religious systems of thought and passed on through them into political ideologies. It stresses man as being separate from nature and uses science and technology to control nature and man. It took root in the early Christian church and then grew to be a dominant ideology in Protestantism. The secular religious myths of the free market and communism which originated from Northern Europe also share this belief. The Northern European strain of Christianity stressed that man was separate from nature and mans spirituality only came from God, who was necessarily distinct from, and the binary opposite of nature.
The early precursor to science, and the first attempts to institutionalise science was through a mode of thought called natural theology. Natural theology was the study of nature to come to a better understanding of God; God was found in nature. In the European church which arose from the Reformation, God and Nature were mutually exclusive. It was taught in the early Eastern church that God created nature to communicate with man, while it is taught in the Western church that God created nature to be separate from man. It was from this belief that man began the study of nature to see how it worked and not to see how man was supposed to be. Early science in the East was an attempt to understand Gods purpose for man. Nature was important for man because it explained his situation and his destiny. Science in the West was an attempt to understand God. To think his thought after him and for him. Modern science is a continuation of this natural theology; although Marx and Mill believed that religion would die out with the growth of speculative science.
The Celtic plough was an early agricultural field system from Northern Europe. Current dominant systems of religion and politics are derived from Northern Europe from the descendants of the peasants who created this type of plough. Western ideologies and politics share much with Christianity. They both have faith in progress. This faith in progress helped create this plough and spurned on all advances in agricultural technology.
With the invention of the new plough in northern Europe farming was no longer about need. It became about capacity. This early labour saving device allowed fewer farmers to grow more crops which created a shift in farming which can be seen as an early precursor to capitalism. This laid the seed for the agricultural revolution, as more land was allocated for farming; and, later the mass movements of peasants into towns and industry when they were no longer needed in the fields. It mixed scientific knowledge with empirical technology and this let man became an exploiter of nature as they began to use nature for more then just their bare needs. They were set apart from nature. Man coerces nature. He is no longer a part of it. Man and nature are two distinctive things and man is superior.
North European technology has always been designed to make the world a better place. With the growth of Christianity and the merger of science and technology science and technology is believed to be able to make a heaven on earth. The core beliefs of Western Christanity have been recycled into belief in scientific progress. Humans can use the power over nature that has been given to them by science to created a better world now than has ever existed before, or scarcely been imagined before. Science was traditionally aristocratic and intellectual, while technology was thought of as belonging to the lower classes because it was empirical and action orientated. The two were fused together and grew and changed as one from the middle of the 19th century. The democratic revolution reduced social barriers allowed the transition of knowledge and skill on the social spectrum. As a result technology became speculative while science became more technological. The merger of science and technology was a union between empirical and theoretical approaches to the environment. Scientific knowledge is thought to mean technological power over nature; while natural science is an effort to understand the science of things in nature.
All major agricultural, industrial, developments occurred in the west. The introduction of Greek and Arabic scientific works and knowledge into Europe formed a basis for all future European technological and scientific progress but all modern science and technology are inherently European. The merger of the two occurred in Europe and it retains it European characteristics to this day.

The separation of politics and religion and the combination of technology and science spurned on more sophisticated and technologically advanced inventions and ideologies. Science may have replaced religion but science has become a vehicle for needs which are indisputably religious. Science now offers meaning and hope and the promise of a better life. The growth of knowledge is unstoppable.

The continued belief that scientific knowledge means technological control over nature is based on western political ideologies. Capitalism and Communism both believe in using technology to control nature. Technology is explained as a realisation of the Christian dogma of mans transcendence and rightful mastery over nature.

Other species are just means to the satisfaction of human wants. The earth is a site for the realization of human ambitions and dreams. The belief that the earth belongs to humans is a residue of theism.