Attitudes Toward Nature as a Key for Understanding the Current Lack of Adequate Environmental Behavior: Overstepping the Dialectic of Extractivism and Romanticism

Abstract

This article clarifies the puzzling lack of adequate human environmental behavior, the primary driver of the ongoing climate crisis. It advocates using Wittgensteinian attitude analysis as an investigative framework and argues that attitudes toward nature are crucial yet understudied factors in shaping environmental behavior. The study focuses on the Romantic attitude toward nature as wilderness (understood as the negation of extractivism) and reveals its profound yet often misunderstood adverse impact on environmental behavior. This leads to a reflection on which attitude toward nature could foster more adequate environmental behavior, suggesting kinship as its core.