But, proceeding from the assumption that the ecological crisis is at bottom a cultural crisis, some environmentalists and activists have challenged the very terms of the debate. In The Culture of Denial, C. A. Bowers asks hard questions about the nature of culture, and asserts that people living the modernist western lifestyle, and Americans in particular, are participating in a culture that is in denial about serious environmental issues. Public schools and universities have not recognized that, by advancing a particular knowledge-system, they are actually sorting various bodies of knowledge into different qualitative categories. High status knowledge, according to Bowers, is that which is favored by the modernist educational system and is primarily concerned with technological progress and economic growth. Low status knowledge, on the other hand, is generally excluded from view because it refers things that do not promote the modernist system.
Educational institutions reinforce the behavior that is pervasive in consumer society.
Bowers discusses how the American corporate media also promote a message that equates 'modern' and 'progressive' with a consumer lifestyle and technological advancement. Media coverage of local knowledge schemes, especially those that have coherent and workable visions of ecologically sound living, is virtually non-existent. Bowers argues that many western-oriented societies share a conceptual matrix that denies the ecological impact of their cultural beliefs and practices, irrespective of the surface political debates that busy them. With the advent of satellite television, western corporations and their local proxies are now able to advertise the modernist way of life to the whole world, or to those parts that can afford the equipment. This makes sense because western civilization has largely lost sight of its identity, and has come to rely on advertisement and fantasy-fulfilment to define what is important, and to create a sense of self and society.