Could it be that we have unfairly neglected French contributions to green theory because of words written more than 350 years ago?1 It was a sixteenth-century Frenchman who, in the opinion of many green thinkers, penned the most notorious line in the history of Western philosophy. René Descartes (1637: 40) proposed that we “make ourselves masters and possessors of nature”2 by subjecting our material environment first to rational analysis and then to technological control. Fritjof Capra (1982: 61) speaks for many ecologists when he charges that the Cartesian view of the universe “provided a ‘scientific’ sanction for the manipulation and exploitation of nature that has become typical of Western.
