The historical roots of our ecological crisis

"the text of Genesis (1, 26) which seems to legitimate the exploitation of nature was never interpreted in this sense by either Jews or Christians before the advent of the modern project[.] . . . [T]hat project is [therefore] more the cause than the consequence of the meaning erroneously ascribed to the biblical verses."

     Rémi Brague, citing the 1989 Cornell University Press monograph depicted, in Moderately modern, trans. Paul Seaton (South Bend, IN:  St. Augustine's Press, 2019), 123.  "Genesis" is italicized in the original, but not for emphasis.  "Not only would Christianity be responsible for the delay in the development of the sciences and technology, but it also would be responsible for the exact opposite, the excessive developments of the two, by handing the earth over to the disordered appetites of man, whom the Bible would consider as its master. . . .  In this way Christianity performs the feat, here with progress as in other ways, of being false in every respect.  It is guilty of everything, but also its contrary."