Devoted to Nature: The Religious Roots of American Environmentalism

Abstract

Evan Berry wrote Devoted to Nature, a revision of his dissertation, to illuminate a crucial factor overlooked by most histories of the American environmental movement, that of religious influence. “The roots of environmentalism grew in religious soil,” Berry writes (p. 4). Most environmental historians lack any training in religious studies and have consistently undervalued or downplayed Christian sources and context for the conservation and early environmental movements. In four chapters Berry argues that an evolving conceptualization of nature led to environmentalism. He traces transformations of Christian theology during the medieval debate between nominalist and scholastic theologians, and later under the influence of nineteenth-century romanticism and Transcendentalism, that set the stage for an environmentalist appropriation of Christian soteriology (or doctrine of salvation) during the 1920s and 1930s. Calling this period the “progressive era,” he maintains that the era's activity in outdoor recreation and nature preservation prepared the way for the environmentalism of the 1960s and 1970s.