By reverence, I do not suggest a return to rigid religious beliefs or supernatural ideas. Instead, I refer to a way of perceiving and relating to the world that appreciates its inherent meaning rather than just its utility.
To view a forest with reverence is to see more than just timber, carbon storage, real estate, or an ecosystem service. Similarly, to regard a river with reverence is not to merely assess its hydrological usefulness.
Reverence challenges the notion of reducing the world to mere commodities and resources. It encourages us to recognize the intrinsic value of beings, places, and communities beyond their practical use to us.
Unfortunately, modern industrial civilization has largely conditioned us to think otherwise.
Guilt
Under the influence of capitalism, practical reasoning, and technological dominance, the Earth is increasingly seen as a reserve of resources awaiting extraction, manipulation, optimization, and consumption.
Forests are reduced to timber resources, animals to protein units, land to property, and humans to consumers, workers, users, data points, and economic participants.
This shift is not only economic but also metaphysical, altering our perception of the world.
A world devoid of sacredness is not just without deities; it is increasingly stripped of intrinsic significance, where value becomes entangled with market value, utility, productivity, or exchange.
In such a context, restraint is hard to justify without fear, regulation, guilt, or calculation. If nothing is sacred, why not use everything? If the Earth is merely material, why not exploit it to its fullest?
Being
While scientific knowledge is crucial—climate science, ecology, systems modeling, and biophysical economics have highlighted our predicament with remarkable accuracy—it alone cannot teach us to cherish the world. Science can report on collapsing ecosystems, measure carbon levels, and track species decline.
It can alert us to thresholds and feedback mechanisms, but it cannot independently foster the reverence needed to perceive restraint as care rather than punishment.
In this context, Erich Fromm’s distinction between the “having” and “being” modes of existence is enlightening.
In the having mode, identity is shaped by possession, acquisition, accumulation, and control. One is defined by what they own, consume, and can display, command, or secure.
Dissatisfaction
The having mode aligns closely with consumer capitalism, as growth economies thrive on expanding desires. They need individuals who feel incomplete and seek fulfillment through consumption.
The being mode, in contrast, is rooted not in ownership but in presence, participation, creativity, contemplation, relationships, and love.
In the being mode, a forest holds significance not because it can be owned, harvested, or monetized, but because of the experience of dwelling within it, walking beneath its canopy, breathing its air, and being transformed by its presence.
This difference is not just ethical but existential. The having mode views reality instrumentally, while the being mode sees it reverentially.
This distinction clarifies why the ecological crisis is also a crisis of desire. Consumer society does not merely meet needs; it creates dissatisfaction.
Simplicity
Advertising and digital media foster longing, insecurity, comparison, novelty-seeking, and status anxiety.
Consumption becomes a means of self-construction. Under these conditions, calls for ecological restraint threaten not only comfort but identity.
Believing that freedom lies in consuming more makes sufficiency feel like failure. Believing that status depends on upward mobility and visible accumulation makes simplicity feel like humiliation.
Believing that progress equates to greater speed, power, novelty, and control makes ecological limits feel like defeat. The challenge, therefore, is not just to consume less but to desire differently.
This is why voluntary simplicity, at its best, is not a harsh ethic of renunciation. It is not about moral purity or self-denial for its own sake.
It is an attempt to shift from having to being. Simplicity can create space for attention, community, beauty, craft, contemplation, and ecological engagement.
It can reduce the compulsive pursuit of accumulation and expose individuals to forms of richness that consumer culture conceals.
However, such a shift cannot be achieved through argument alone. Humans are not solely rational actors who change their lives simply because they encounter better data.
We are symbolic, aesthetic, emotional, and embodied beings, influenced by stories, rituals, images, habits, atmospheres, and shared practices.
Thus, ecological politics must transcend policy and become a cultural transformation.
Post-consumerist
This is what I mean by sacred revolt. It does not imply a theocratic agenda. It is not anti-science, anti-modern, or nostalgically simplistic.
It is a rebellion against the belief that everything real can be reduced to commodity, utility, or exchange value. It is a revolt against consumer capitalism’s grip on attention.
It is a revolt against turning forests into inventory, communities into markets, and individuals into economic units. Fundamentally, it is a revolt against the notion that the Earth exists primarily to fuel industrial growth.
Such a revolt must incorporate political and economic dimensions. We need institutions centered on sufficiency rather than endless growth.
We need ecological democracy, commons-based systems, regenerative agriculture, shorter working hours, local resilience, reduced inequality, public goods, and forms of prosperity beyond consumerism.
Machinery
No amount of personal reverence can offset destructive systems that force people into ecological harm.
But structural change is insufficient if people continue envisioning the good life through accumulation and consumption.
A post-growth society must be desirable. It must address the question consumer society answers incorrectly yet compellingly: what makes life worth living? The answer will not lie in austerity but in richer forms of being.
An ecological civilization will require new symbols of prosperity: shared meals, restored landscapes, walkable neighborhoods, local festivals, gardens, rituals, crafts, public beauty, music, slowness, silence, friendship, meaningful work, and direct involvement with the more-than-human world.
These may seem modest alongside the vast machinery of global capitalism, but they matter because they alter perception. They teach us what to cherish. And what people cherish, they are more likely to protect.
Freedom
This is why I propose that nurturing reverence might precede restraint.
If ecological politics starts by demanding sacrifice from individuals already spiritually drained by consumer modernity, resistance is likely.
However, if people first rekindle their ability to experience the living world as beautiful, mysterious, finite, and deserving of care, then restraint takes on a new meaning. It no longer represents external limitation but becomes fidelity, gratitude, and love expressed as self-limitation.
Thus, the ecological question is not solely about how humanity can restrain itself enough to survive. While urgent, this question is incomplete.
The deeper inquiry is how humanity can relearn to love the world enough to avoid destroying it. Only when existence itself is deemed worthy of reverence will limits cease to be perceived as mere loss. Then, restraint may become not the denial of freedom but one of its most beautiful manifestations.
This Author
Dr. Sam Alexander is the author of Beyond Capitalist Realism: The Politics, Energetics, and Aesthetics of Degrowth.
Read his paper, ‘Sacred Revolt: Why Reverence Before Restraint Transforms the Limits-to-Growth Predicament’, online.
