The western Christian tradition has come under criticism in recent times for having been interested in nature only as a foil to theology, an approach which has been thought to allow the growth of a destructive anti-environmental culture. Our present troubles are, in this argument, at least partly the result of a theology which regarded the natural world as fallen, and essentially separate from a transcendent God. Irish, or ‘Celtic’, culture has often been held to be the exception, and learning from it could restore something lost to western culture. Something in the spirituality of Ireland or its Celtic culture attuned its saints and writers to a more appreciative sense of the place of nature in God's Creation. A famous example of Irish natural spirituality is the probably tenth-century poem in praise of a hermit's hermitage:

This can be read, and it has been, as an example of an author taking ‘nature’ as a ‘subject’ rather than an ‘object’: appreciating nature for its own characteristics rather than for purposeful human needs. This may well be the case, but the interpretation ignores the contemporary theological context. The theme of this piece is the earthly paradise, where there is no antagonism between the social (human) and the wild.