The dominant culture has lost the sense of sacredness in the relationship of individuals to the world around them. The world people live in has become "disenchanted", a world made up of discrete, disconnected (or unmeaningfully connected) objects, with which people are free to do with what they please. It is increasingly unclear what people should do and what their rightful place is within this context.
All life has an intrinsic value. People have no right to exterminate species or local populations of species.
Spirituality may be understood as a form of epistemological relationship to the world. Modern conceptions of the world and the individual's epistemological relationship to it are often depicted as despiritualized, characterized from an ontological perspective as a universe without a God or as a mechanistic world. But epistemological despiritualization is a colonizing relationship to it that implicitly or explicitly underlies an individual's relationship to it. This is most obvious in the interiorization of value within human subjectivity that came about with the advent of modern metaphysical empiricism. It is the repressed mythic thinking, by contrast, which carries knowledge of how a people can integrate their activities with those of the sentient beings by which they are surrounded, integrating the qualities of autonomy and community essential to sustainable society.