Green areas in cities and trees growing on streets and squares of urban sites are features that only recently acquired relevance in the western world. It seems that formerly urban inhabitants did not value a close proximity with plants. In the present paper it is suggested that this is a consequence of a rupture between man and nature that can be traced back to the emergence of the Judaic-Christian tradition. The absence of links between nature and Christianism is evident by the common absence of trees, gardens and other aspects representative of nature around Christian temples. Christianism represented also an end to mythology, a process that led to the development of the rational thinking and thus favored science development. By their turn, the scientific achievements of the 17th and 18th century strengthened the belief in the superiority of the human being and thus reinforced the alleged right of man, founded on religious grounds, to dominate over nature. The overvalue of the knowledge derived from science and of the concepts and habits of the civilized world, together with the non acceptance of values from the wild and conquered peoples led to the extinction of the tradition and languages of many native nations. A resurgence of the values linked with nature in the western civilized world came only with the Romantic Movement of the 19th century, still restricted to the elite. A strong valorization of nature and its representatives was only brought about in the 20th century, mainly in the last decades, by the Environmentalist Movement. But the ancient notion that nature exists to serve man is still prevalent in many sectors of our society. A point is advocated that ethic and moral principles need to be called upon to defend and preserve nature. In special, it is argued that, as an important aid to the actions of the World Environmentalist Movement, all religious should assume as one of their priorities the protection of nature and wild living beings, because ethic and moral items can best be absorbed by the human mind when administered by religious means.
environmentalism; tree planting; conservation; ethics; landscaping