I enjoyed reading this article because it connected one class that I have already taken at BSC (the honors class Ecospirituality) and this class in a very interesting way. I had already known that Christianity is very anthropocentric but this article spelled it out in a way that applied it not only to the Middle Ages but to our current "post-christian" viewpoints. My favorite quote that the author used was the quote from the governor of California who said that basically all redwood trees are the same. This just shows how little Christianity and our christian society view of nature as just a physical thing and not a spiritual one.
The author also discussed how the people of the Middle Ages onward really only started to see nature as a part of the physical world and not the spiritual world like those of antiquity thought. I had never thought about how important St. Francis was and how rebelious his thoughts about nature were for the time. From the reading, it seemed as though he was trying to move Christianity back towards the idea that all nature is equal, not just humans at the top. This seems like a regression back to antiquity that could have really helped us in the present to be more environmentally conscious if his attempts had not failed.