The Weeping Mask: Ecological Crisis and the View of Nature

Vítor Westhelle

Article Type: Article

Publication Date: 4/1/1991

Issue: The Environment (Vol. 11, No 2, Spring, 1991)

Our lack of understanding of existence as being conditioned by the place that occupies us has exiled us from pre-modern or ancient views, in which the detachment of a people from its place is a rupture that amounts to death. This manner of thinking is expressed powerfully in the words of Job who says of those who go down to Sheol that from there they will not return “nor do their places know them any more” (Job 7:10). The symbolic character of the crisis has turned the ecological problem into a riddle that will not be solved either by oblivion or by a quantitative increase of technical solutions.

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