Alienation and Nature

Alienation and Nature
Name
Institution
Alienation refers to the process where individuals become foreign to their environment. The concept is deeply implanted into most religions, political, and social theories of the civilized era, namely, the thought that some period in the past individuals lived in harmony, and there was a rapture that alienated them from the world (Bollen, 2007). In all historical alienation notions, one can find a common structure. This paper aims at analyzing the various reasons why people are alienated from nature and try to come up with a solution on how to overcome alienation.
Individuals in western industrialized nations increasingly view themselves as disconnected from nature (Bakari. 2014). Researchers think these people have developed this sense of being separate from nature for a number of reasons. Several authors argue that people were once physically and psychologically closer to the world than people in industrialized countries are now. Increased scientific knowledge brought about forces of urbanization and industrialization, which split people from their environments. The public, researchers, and philosophers have struggled to define nature, but there is no simple definition of nature. Lack of contact with the natural environment and increased contact with fabricated environments might lead individuals to feel more distant from the environments although human beings are a part of nature (Hodder, 2011).
Since the arrival of Europeans in the shores of most countries one of the biggest reasons of clashing culturally with indigenous people has been their varying attitudes towards the environment. Indigenous people around the globe have been regularly appalled by how European individuals do not respect nature and their systematic exploitation of the natural environment. On the other side, Europeans have continued viewing nature as nothing more than a collection of resources that people should exploit. Most people view natural things as entities with no inner being or life (Melinda and Price, 2008).
Among the European concepts that indigenous people like Australian Aborigines and Native Americans found difficult to comprehend was that of owning natural resources and land. Ownership refers to a position where a person is dominant and superior over something. Since people know that they are alive and conscious, and view natural things as not being conscious or alive, they feel that they are superior and feel like they must dominate nature, like a master dominates a slave. However, indigenous peoples’ perspective of the aliveness and sacredness of nature does not allow them to take the European attitude. Even in their communities, they rarely saw themselves as owning natural resources or land in the sense that people understand the word. These people believed that nobody owns land; therefore, they viewed themselves as taking care of it on behalf of a Great Spirit. Often, the attitude worked in favor of European colonists since native saw the notion of selling land as a joke thus letting Europeans buy land for almost nothing.
Some authors believe that even the ancestors of Europeans viewed the world as sacred until fairly recent times. It seems that people lost this vision because...