At the least, Nature is only a scenic backdrop on the stage where Man, proud Man, plays out his dramas. Lest the gender-conscious protest that the other sex has been slighted by references only to Man, the masculine term is purposely used because the other blind spot of Western sages is precisely the feminine. They have paid as little attention to Woman as to the Ecosphere. As an extension of what was expected in their homes they projected an inert Nature, a passive Mother Earth, simply there to be husbanded. Today of course even husbandry is passe.
Nothing is to be gained by dwelling on the ignorance of our otherwise illustrious ancestors.
That they were not great ecologists is regrettable, but for that they cannot be blamed. As little as four or five centuries ago, Europeans thought that the Earth was the centre of the solar system, and only in the last 50 years has suspicion dawned that things other than people may possess intrinsic values too. We, however, have been granted glimmerings of ecological insight, enough to know that the answers to current environmental woes will not be found in the pronouncements of the ancients. Theistic or humanistic, but always homocentric, they speak to the human condition as it existed before 1950. They speak for a world that excluded the Real World.