Humanizing the earth: Reversing the 'reverence to resource' in the Indian context

In Indian thought, the earth has been accorded a divine status and is revered as a goddess. Given the reverence shown to earth in Indian culture, the unsustainable extraction of resources from the land is a contradiction. A discourse about the earth as a goddess who is divine and therefore indestructible often masks exploitation and neglect towards the corporeal earth. Along with this, forms of extracting resources from the earth are justified by narratives that can be traced to the historical conceptualization of the earth and woman in Vedic and Purānic thought. An earth-centered ethics that can be conceptually derived from an idea of reverence needs to exclude this subtle imbalance by distinguishing between inauthentic reverence to a mother goddess and authentic care towards the earth as an aging mother in her corporeal form.