"Man cannot long separate himself from nature without withering as a cut rose in a vase. One of the deceptive aspects of mind in man is to give him the illusion of being distinct from and over against but not a part of nature. It is but a single leap thus to regard nature as being so completely other than himself that he may exploit it, plunder it, and rape it with impunity. This we see all around us in the modern world. Our atmosphere is polluted, our streams are poisoned, our hills are denuded, wild life is increasingly exterminated, while more and more man becomes an alien on the earth and a fouler of his own nest.
"The price that is being exacted for this is a deep sense of isolation, of being rootless and a vagabond. Often I have surmised that this condition is more responsible for what seems to be the phenomenal increase in mental and emotional disturbances in modern life than the pressures - economic, social, and political - that abound on every hand. The collective psyche shrieks with the agony that it feels as a part of the death cry of a pillaged nature."
Howard Thurman, 1971
Photos: Snow Buttercups, Montgomery Pass, Rawah Range, CO, June 22, 2015; Archive Photo of Howard Thurman.
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