Are We Self-Destructive? (Turtle Island)- Katie Lamp

I think Snyder sums up one of the most important considerations from this class in his chapter "The Wilderness" when he says:

"I don't like Western culture because I think it has much in it that is inherently wrong and that is at the root of the environmental crisis that is not recent; it is very ancient; it has been building up for a millenium. There are many things in Western culture that are admirable. But a culture that alienates iself from the very ground of its own being- from the wilderness outside (that is to say, wild nature, the wild, self-contained, self-informing ecosystems) and from that other wilderness, the wilderness within- is doomed to a very destructive behavior, ultimately perhaps self-destructive behavior" (Snyder, 106)

Are we a self-destructive society? I'd like to think we are not because this makes us look terrible as a species and it seems very fatalistic to say we are destroying ourselves and that the "end is near" so to speak, but Snyder makes a good point as have some of the other authors we have read this semester. We have alienated ourselves from nature so much that those individuals who either live in nature or spend a great deal of time there are the exception rather than the rule. We as a society have made ourselves so comfortable surrounded by our concrete, glass and central heating that most of us wouldn't survive a week if dropped into nature and asked to fend for ourselves without our grocery stores and computers. While Snyder seems to take a very negative approach when he says that we are self-destructive, I think he may, unfortunately, be right and I'm not sure we can ever go back.