Research shows time and again that the vast majority of the European population today is abandoning anthropocentrism and is moving towards a non-anthropocentric view. A recent survey in the Netherlands concluded that Dutch in the majority have ‘an ecocentric view of nature’ (van den Berg et al 2021). Most Europeans today no longer believe that humans are the crowning glory of creation and instead share the premise that we should seek a more just, more equal relationship with other species (Van den Born 2008; De Groot et al 2011; Manfredo et al 2020). But while many people reject anthropocentrism in principle, it turns out to be difficult to give substance to this basic attitude towards nature in practice. This is particularly apparent when environmental problems lead to controversy, and when it turns out that concern for non-human nature has implications for vested interests and ingrained habits. It is easy to love nature when it is cute and beautiful, but in our dealings with troublesome, unruly or unappealing nature, or nature that simply gets in the way, this turns out to be far from obvious. Then the first impulse is still to control and master nature. The fierce debate surrounding the return of the wolf to western Europe is a clear example of the difficulty to find a more ecocentric view on human– wildlife coexistence. There appears to be an enormous gap between the pious intentions for a more nature-friendly lifestyle and the choices that are made in everyday practice, in which human self-interests most of the time still prevail over those of other species. An important cornerstone of traditional anthropocentrism is nature–culture dualism: the idea that there is a sharp distinction between the world of humans and the natural world. Although today it has become a platitude to emphasise that we humans are part of nature, this dualism, and the human exceptionalism that comes with it, still plays a major role in our dealings with non-human nature.

To a large extent, humans have been able, with the help of culture and technology, to detach themselves from the immediate ecological contexts in which they had long been absorbed.