Ecological Civilization Period, Rethinking The Relationship With Nature

Since ancient times, human beings have been very concerned about the relationship between nature and themselves. Due to different levels of productivity development and scientific development in different periods, the way people think and their attitude towards the nature is not the same. Thus, the relationship between man and nature also showed different characteristics. During the period of collecting and hunting food, the nature played an absolutely leading role and human became its slaves with no position at all, so their relationship is the slave-master relationship. During the period of agricultural civilization, although human started to exploit the nature in small-scale, but the nature is still the God in people's minds and human still can not control their own fates. Therefore, the relationship between man and nature is the servant-master relationship. But as the development of productive forces and science and technology, during the period of industrial civilization, mankind, in turn, became masters of nature.During the period of post-industrial civilization, human faced unprecedented survival difficulties, so in order to alleviate their relationship with nature, people began to reflect on their own behavior. Ecological thinking is a product of such environment. It is relationship thinking as well as dialectical thinking, way of thinking beyond the physical and mechanical thinking. Under the guidance of such way of thinking, people re-examined their own relationship with nature and recognized that the nature and human should achieve dialogue in equal position. In fact, the ideal state between the two should be the relationship between you and me, rather than the relationship between subject and object, nor the relationship between me and him. However, in the perspective of Historical Materialism, considering the relationship between man and nature as the relationship between me and you is just kind of value ideals, without considering in a deeper level. In fact, in order to find the root cause of this problem, we must start from the system. Post-modern paradigm and sustainable development paradigm are both cultural determinism. They consider the issue from a very high level of values and not only do not go beyond Marx, but also can not fundamentally solve the problem. Therefore, during the period of ecological civilization, we must establish the paradigm of historical materialism and achieve the conversion of research paradigms.