Overwhelming devastation from pollution, climate change, species loss, environmental refugees, childhood illnesses, and the rest constitute a crisis of our society and indeed our entire civilization. This chapter examines the roles played in that crisis by religion and philosophy, politics and economics, popular culture, and widespread forms of self-identity. Stress is placed on the environmentally destructive fusion of technological development, corporate power, and political authority; on how traditional religion and philosophy assumed nature’s lack of inherent moral value; and how ordinary lives are shaped by reliance on wasteful and polluting technology, consumerism, alienation from nature, and an emotional dependence on work that leads to a psychological compulsion to participate in an environmentally destructive society. Some scant hope is found in the unpredictable ability of humans to learn from experience and sometimes turn away from self- and other-destructive madness.