**7. Philosophical, anthropological, theological, and scientific trends in mitigation of the Western contribution to the environmental crisis**

The recognition that modernity has brought with it forces that are destructive to the environment has led to what I have called a counter modernist trend across academic disciplines. I have published several essays around this theme [15–17].

The influences shaping counter-modernism have the following guiding motifs in common: the recognition of the earth as a living organism; the removal of human beings as the apex agent, and the recognition of multiplicities of agencies; a cluster of values frequently described in terms of relationism, holism, and interconnectivity; and the recognition of the intrinsic worth of the other-than-human world. These motifs are discernible in religion, anthropology, and science theory and can be found in process thinking (both in science and theology), cybernetics, the Gaia hypothesis, eco-feminism, the rediscovery of indigenous worldviews and methodologies, the shift from theism to panentheism, and the "greening" of religion.

#### **7.1 Counter-modernism in philosophy**

Postmodernism has brought about a distinct reaction to the idea that the best way we can understand something is to disengage ourselves from it. The implication of

#### *Indigenous Religions as Antidote to the Environmental Crisis: Surveying a Decade of Reflection DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.105209*

this is the realization that it is impossible to apprehend the world in a way that does not involve some level of participation within it. At a minimal level, this has meant a far greater emphasis on the need to recognize the role of the participant observer who cannot escape influencing the object of observation rather than the detached observer who examines in order to classify, use, and control it. At a far more radical level, however, is the belief in the intersubjective nature of the whole of reality. The world is in constant process of formation and must therefore be understood as being "alive." This has brought into question the fundamental nature of the universe as conceived by Newton and other early scientists as holding together by a set of immutable laws. The theory of relativity put paid to this notion, and the door has been opened for consideration to be given to other constructs of reality that make sense of a universe that is more dynamic than static and more alive than dead. The world of Descartes and Newton has had to give way to that of Einstein and Whitehead. The metaphysics of participation has replaced the metaphysics of separation. This has raised the question of what it means existentially to live in such a world; of whether this would make any difference to our attitude to the environment, and whether we can learn from cultures that relate to the world in a way that perceives it as animate. A new emphasis is being placed on the body's presence in a more-than-human and more-than-material world, which is imbued with multiple forms of agency, the existence of organisms in relation to other organisms and not as autonomous units, the interaction between organisms and the environment in a profoundly interconnected way, and the role of the human being not as engineer or architect, imposing shape, pattern, and form on a hapless environment, but as one agent amidst many whose very agency is itself being shaped by many other forces in existence.

This kind of thinking is well illustrated in the work of contemporary anthropologist Tim Ingold.

#### **7.2 Counter-modernism in anthropology**

Ingold poses the following conundrum: from an evolutionary point of view, all organisms are essentially the same; that is, they derive from, and are made up of, the same matter. This means that humans are constituted with the same basic matter as all other things. From this point of view, "we" are one of "them" when it comes to comparing stones, clouds, chimpanzees, and humans, though obviously with varying degrees of complexity. But human beings have added a further element to themselves which they call mind or self-awareness. We are the same as all other things except, apparently, in this respect: we are creatures.

*[F]or whom being is knowing, [who] can so detach [our] consciousness from the traffic of [our] bodily interactions in the environment as to treat the latter as our object of concern. To be human in this sense - to exist as a knowing subject - is, we commonly say, to be a person ([18], p. 90).*

Ingold rejects this fundamentally dualistic ontology and attempts, in his own thinking, to "restore human beings to the organic lifeworld in a way that does not reduce them to mere objects of nature" ([18], p. 90).

Three things stand out in Ingold's work—his rejection of mainstream Cartesian thinking in the human sciences; his embrace of Phenomenological methodology; and his use of indigenous culture as paradigmatic of an alternative way of being in the world. This is no better illustrated than in his discussion of the propensity in

primal cultures to accept as normative the fact that all things are potentially animate. Stones, clouds, and trees may have the same kind of life as otters, elephants, and human beings, depending on the circumstances in which they participate in the life of other beings in the world. All organisms, including human ones, are not lifeless things but beings. As beings, persons are organisms, and, being organisms, they, or rather we, are not impartial observers of nature but participate from within in the continuum of organic life. *It is not what goes on within things that cause them to have life and being but what goes on between them*. I emphasize this because it underscores Taylor's notion of the porous self and the issue of relationality that is at the heart of the indigenous worldview. Because such a worldview is so foreign to the Western rational mind, the stereotype of the primitive savage is reinforced. Reality as posed by primal cultures, in the Western schema, is no reality at all. Reality is not what our experience tells us but what our [scientific] minds tell us. And our scientific minds must operate not on the basis of involvement in the world, where such "confusion" as we see among primal culture reigns, but on the basis of detachment from the world. Only thus can we get some kind of certainty of our relationship with the world around us. But what happens to personhood in such a process? Ingold poses the (il) logic of the argument for disengaged reflection thus:

*The notion that persons, as beings in the world, can appear in both human and other-than-human forms may sound strange, but it is not half as strange as the notion that to become a person - to be in a position to know and reflect upon the nature of existence - means taking oneself out of the world ([18], p. 90).*
