I was discussing how we need to experience ourselves in such a way that we could say that our real body is not just what is inside the skin but includes our whole total external environment. If we do not experience ourselves that way, we tend to mistreat our environment. We treat it as an enemy. We try to beat it into submission, and if we do that, then comes disaster. We exploit the world we live in and we do not treat it with love and gentleness and respect. We cut down millions of acres of forests to turn it into newspaper, of all things. Lovely trees are turned into information about nothing, and we do not replace them properly. We kick the world around in revenge for our feeling that really we are puppets which the world kicks around.

— Alan Watts, The Tao of Philosophy