“I believe it is critically important for all Westerners to realize that the idea of the earth not being alive is a new idea. Even today, that view is far from universal and may represent a minority viewpoint, advocated mainly by people who live in Western technological cultures. Failing to see the planet as alive, they have become free of moral and ethical constraints, and have benefited from exploiting resources at the earth's expense. But if the majority of people in the United States, Western Europe, and the Soviet Union are comfortable regarding the earth as a huge, dead rock, this is emphatically not true of those Indians and aboriginal peoples throughout the world who continue to live as they have for thousands of years, in direct relationship to the planet.”