Various ecological thinkers have pointed out that in the West, the felt sense of place--that tree, this brook, my room--has slowly given way to the abstract notion of space: a chunk of real estate, a Cartesian grid, a sector on a map. Philosopher Ed Casey points out that many languages contain this place/space distiction, which in the West goes back at least as far as Plato's Timaeus. Our cultural preferrence for space to place survived even the Einsteinian destruction of categories like absolute time and space: in fact, "place was absorbed into space. " This has far-reaching consequences for how we experience ourselves as subjects, lost and place-impoverished, in a conceptually dematerialized world. (Casey points out, for example, the word morality goes back to a term for "custom," whereas the word ethics refers ultimately to the place where the horses went home at night. For more information, see his Getting Back into Place and The Fate of Place. )