Reduction

The most fundamental of these desecrations has been the reduction of the human image, which we once understood as the image of God, to an image merely of humanity itself as a "higher animal" -- with the implied permission to be more bewildered, violent, self-deluded, destructive, and self-destructive than any of the animals. From the desecration of that image, the desecration of the world and all its places and creatures inexorably follows. For it appears that, having once repudiated our primordial likening to the maker and preserver of the world, we don't become merely higher animals, merely neutral components of the creation-by-chance of the materialists, but are ruled instead by an antithetical likeness to whatever unmakes and fragments the world.
Wendell Berry"Against the Nihil of the Age" in Imagination in Place