Mind-body dualism, the idea from which the scientific and industrial revolutions sprang forth, is the core philosophical issue preventing humanity from dealing with the consequences of climate change.
When we accept this materialist idea, that consciousness is separate from physical reality, it engenders us with a bias toward treating all of nature as also separate from us.
In this worldview, we ask the question:
How does the physical properties of a brain “give rise” to the conscious experience that we would call “us”?
At the heart of this idea is the inability to recognize the interconnected ecosystem that is our reality.
If biological systems in the natural world are all mechanistic - “giving rise” to consciousness in certain circumstances, then consciousness exists “over and above” these systems - distinctly separate. It becomes easy to draw a line from that view to the idea that “everything else” only exists to help us survive or bring us pleasure.
Pansychism offers respite from this worldview asserting that consciousness is a fundamental aspect of this reality connecting us with the world around us. In this worldview, nature is a part of us - the earth representing humanity’s mother.
By integrating conscious experience with our scientific understanding of the world, we can collectively find the motivation to value our environment and deal with the realities of climate change.
Source: Galileo’s Error Foundations for a New Science of Consciousness