Look at the differences with people driving in Québec, France or Italy compared to the rest of Canada. Catholicism is the main religion in Québec and many latin country. Catholic religion told us that the priest is responsible for communication with God and if you do anything bad, you must ask forgiveness to the priest on Sunday. Somewhat, we are then not in power of our own destiny, but the priest is. Protestantism, more present in the rest of Canada, taught a more direct communication with God, which help empowering people to be more responsible in their life and on the road... France, Quebec are much more structure in their law system than the rest of Canada. Quebec a civil code, while the rest of Canada relies on past court decision, or the common law, or "common sense"...
I often think that one of the reason why we are not respecting our planet is that we think we are superior to it. We are the intelligent species on Earth that can control all others. By saying, "you can stop progress", we became so good in controlling nature that we are now killing it and we will be the next species at risk if we continue the current curse. All of this false superiority, I believed is linked to our foundations of our society, which is rooted into the Genesis and Christianity.
The other point that I would make, is that we designed our factories, our economy, our education, with the straight line model that look likes our conception of life. We extract ressources (give birth), manufacture (being raise), use (strive for success and being parent as well) and dispose or them (die). It seems to be the normal thing to do and that was how my engineering courses at universities were designed.
There is no linear process in nature and there is no way we wan solve climate change (achieve 95% emissions reduction by 2050) if we don't start doing like nature and recycle absolutely everything. This concept in engineering is called industrial ecology. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
I don't know much about Eastern culture much and their conception of life (I also have no clue about Islam), but I believe there is much more "recycling loop" in the Eastern culture. Hindism, buddism believe in reincarnation and it seems that their society was not in race of extraction natural resources, until they saw what we were doing and find it cool. Some tibetans culture cut their deaths and feed back fishes and birds ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
First nation cultures in America have a drastic different relationship with Earth. They are part of the ecosystem. Hunters used to visit Shaman to ask permission to kill an animal and feed their families. Western culture made hunting a sport game.
Finally, for centuries, Catholic Church have been the most powerful and wealthy institution in the world. If our society was dominated then by building covered with gold, maybe we wanted to achieve the same.
If we want to move away from catastrophic climate changes consequences and declines in ecosystems, we need to redefine our deep notion of what are we living for, what we are striving for. I think that philosophy and spirituality and maybe a fresh way of looking at religion can help us achieving this.
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