These secular worldviews are said to be directly responsible for the spiritual crisis in "modern man", which has ultimately resulted in the current environmental degradation.
[10] Nasr believes that the environmental catastrophe is the result of a spiritual crisis in "modern man," which was sparked by the reduction and trivialization of religious ideas about nature, the universe, and humanity.
[11] It is the secularized worldview that reduces nature to a purely material domain cut off from the world of the Spirit to be plundered at will for what is usually called human welfare, but which really means the illusory satisfaction of a never-ending greed without which consumer society would not exist.
The environmental catastrophe is portrayed as an outward representation of an inner malaise that resides within the souls of men and women who have abandoned heaven for earth and are now on the verge of destroying it.
For McGrath, religion is a natural, unavoidable component of human existence and culture, notwithstanding modernist social engineering initiatives aiming at its extinction in many places.
[8] According to Almut Beringer, a cursory examination of history reveals that living without awareness of a sacred cosmos is a cultural misunderstanding and historical anomaly that Western civilization should reconsider.
Rather, he contended that traditional Islamic theology engages in what he refers to as the symbolist spirit, which sees nature's spiritual quality as well as its physical quantity.
It is in the light of this knowledge, drawn from various traditions—which can in fact enrich other traditions in many ways today—that we must seek to reassert the sacred quality of nature and to speak of its resacralization.
"[21] He refers to the "secular creed of twentieth-century Western culture" as "the most self-centered religion in history", with roots in the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and the underlying premise that "humanity is the arbiter of all ideas and values".
According to him, "humans are immersed in the Divine Muhit and are only unaware of it because of their own forgetfulness and negligence (ghaflah)", which he considers to be the "underlying sin of the soul" that must be overcome by remembrance (dhikr).
[27] Ecofeminists question representations of nature and women as passive resources for exploitation, with a particular emphasis on the traditions of Western science and religion.
According to Ruether, ecofeminism integrates the studies of ecology with feminism by demonstrating the ideological and social-structural links between forces that wish to dominate nature and women.
[11] According to Melissa Raphael, a feminist conception of the sacred would, in some ways, render all things sacramental in its efforts to resacralize nature; but only to a certain point.
He rejects the notion that asceticism implies anti-nature sentiment, reiterating a traditional Muslim warning against greed as a highly destructive force for religiosity and injurious to the environment.
According to Nasr, the modern world must accept asceticism as a means of controlling one's desires and slaying the monster inside, without which the greed that is driving the current degradation of nature cannot be addressed.