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Essay / John Grim and Mary Evelyn Tucker's Ecology And Environment
Religious symbols do not have a precise definition because they are interpreted and reinterpreted over time and place. Not knowing and understanding religious symbols could be the cause of worse exploitation of nature. “The devaluation of nature has been driven to a large extent by an economism that reduces symbolic knowledge to the markets of materialism. Thus, nature is seen as being primarily for human use and exploitation” (34). A better understanding of the functioning of nature and ecology allowing humans to recognize the symbolic and biological interdependence between the two. For example, each bioculture symbol (air, earth, water, and fire) has a unique meaning, such as orient, anchor, nourish, and transform, respectively. The combination of these four symbols is the foundation of religious ecology, "means of orientation and anchoring by which humans, recognizing the limits of phenomenal reality and the suffering inherent in life, undertake specific practices of development and transformation of self and community in a particular cosmological context. who views nature as intrinsically valuable”