One of the great malevolencies of modern (if not Western) culture is the treatment of the habitat of hermits and solitaries, which is to say the habitat of all animate and other beings, but especially of those beings that appreciate the solitude, the silence, and the benignity of simple nature. The heart of the West is rooted in the false premises of Hebrew antiquity, the narrow experience of a hunter-herder culture of the semi-desert. This is succinctly expressed by Aldo Leopold in his classic A Sand County Almanac, published in 1948:
Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. … That land is a community is the basic concept of ecology, but that land is to be loved and respected is an extension of ethics.