Abstract
This review was set in the context of African spirituality and ecology. Specifically, the review addressed issues of African spirituality and the environment from a Kenyan context. Through analyses on existing literature, we examined African worldviews, determined how African spirituality was communicated through the environment, evaluated African ways of regulating the use of the environment, and explored challenges facing African spirituality and ecology today. Results show that African spirituality has been enhanced through the environment where humanity worshipped and venerated everything under the earth, on earth, between the earth and heavens and in the heavens above. Consequently, various methods to restrict the utilization of certain natural resources are employed as a way of conserving the environment. Additional findings demonstrate that African spirituality and ecology are currently facing a number of challenges, hence a major challenge of sustainability of African spirituality in regard to environment. From a spiritual point of view, it is therefore recommended that environmental diversity should be conserved through sustainable development where every person from grassroots level is involved in protecting and maintaining God’s creation. We conclude that African knowledge and belief systems on environmental sustainability could be revitalized and used in environmental conservation.
Highlights
Environment refers to the totality surrounding a substance or a person‘s existence and the way they relate to the world
Under African spirituality and ecology, we examined African worldviews as expressed in plural terms, and explored how African spirituality was communicated through the environment
Most African communities believed that the environment was the abode of the spirits, the living dead and ancestors
Summary
Environment refers to the totality surrounding a substance or a person‘s existence and the way they relate to the world. This covers the social, political, economic, spiritual and natural environment which comprises living and non-living things, including water, air, land, all plants, man and other animals and the existing inter-relationships [1]. Ecology is the science of the mutual relationship of organisms to their environment It is the relationship of living things to one another and their environment or the study of such relationships [2]. ̳Spirituality‖ includes several interrelated levels of reference such as the level of lived experience, which means the attitudes and behaviors of human beings which are typically influenced by their ―ultimate values,‖ and their ―spirituality‖ [4]. On the academic level, ―spirituality‖ refers to the emerging scholarly discipline which studies the lived communal and individual experience of that ―energy, power, or force‖
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