**1. Introduction**

At the heart of the debate around the environmental crisis is the extent to which human activity is responsible for it. The overwhelming consensus is that if it were not for human activity, we would not be facing the crisis that we are at the moment, including that of climate change. What is seldom considered is the profoundly important epistemological question of how human beings understand the relationship between themselves and the world around them because it is this that shapes the way we live in the world and change it. Of the 62 articles and book chapters that I have published in peer-reviewed journals and books over the past two decades, 26 have traversed this topic—how the habitus, the mental universe in which we live and move and have our being, impacts the habitat, the physical world in which we live and move and have our being.1 The journey began with a spiritual mission of reconciliation between the races in apartheid South Africa and rapidly developed into an examination of the epistemological crises and consequences that can occur at the interface of opposing cultures. In the past decade, this journey has focused more specifically on the ecological implications of the encounter and more specifically still on how religion and spirituality shape the relationship between Indigenous peoples and the natural environment in contrast to Westerners whose worldview, generally speaking, has become exorcized of spirituality or, in Weberian terms, disenchanted. Understanding this phenomenon, that is the phenomenon of disenchantment, is crucial to understanding the relationship between a Western worldview and the environmental crisis. The question that needs to be asked is: what has happened in the relationship between human beings and the natural environment that has put us on the path of alienation and destruction in which we find ourselves globally, and what is it about indigenous religions that can help to put us back on the right path?
