Without interiority, objects lack the capacity–however meager it may be–to constitute a perspective of their own in which to register or to take account of other things. By restoring an appropriate position for interiority in the cosmos, we can solve two related problems.

The first is the widespread modern sense that self-aware humankind is an accident in a meaningless material universe within which there is no place for awareness of any sort. Alienated from body, emotions, nature and even consciousness, the abstract modern human ego sets out to know and control the material world that seems simultaneously very real and yet completely other. The second problem is the widespread eco-romantic conviction that only by renouncing mind, consciousness, rationality, and other allegedly alienating features of human consciousness, and only by reabsorbing themselves within the patterns of nature, that is, only by scraping off the sorry accretions imposed by 10,000 years of civilization, can human beings regain their lost unity with Mother Nature. Despite important differences, both the modern abstract ego and the eco-romantic self share something in common: an industrial or flatland ontology, according to which the only things that exist are the surfaces or exteriors of things as they appear in terms of third-person perspectives.

The above passage comes from Michael Zimmerman’s essay titled, Interiority Regained: Integral Ecology and Environmental Ethics. The Art above was created by Robert Mangold.