Nature, Science, and Religion: Intersections Shaping Society and the Environment

Abstract

Nature, Science, and Religion: Intersections Shaping Society and the Environment Catherine M. Tucker (Editor) School for Advanced Research Press, Santa Fe, NM, 2012 304 pp. $34.95 Paper Reviewed by James D. ProctorAny title that includes the terms nature, science, reli- gion, society, and environment runs the risk of wan- dering dangerously into Theory of Everything (ToE) territory. By emphasizing ethnography over philosophy, and focusing on nine case studies of land use and related movements among peripheral regions of the world, this volume generally avoids ToE-scale grandiosity, but given the broad scope important questions remain.I know, as the editor of a volume that also included this trilogy in its title (Proctor 2009). Our effort was organized around five visions for nature spanning the sciences-humanities continuum-evolutionary nature, emergent nature, malleable nature, nature as sacred, and nature as culture-and related no- tions of science and religion. It included a broader disciplinary range of scholars-physical scientists, social scientists, humanists, and theologians, whereas contributors to Nature, Science, and Religion are overwhelmingly social scientists, primarily anthro- pologists. It also approached the key terms broadly as well: as one example, we explicitly avoided collapsing nature onto environment so as to explore the ways in which understandings of science and religion make reinforcing claims upon both human and biophysical nature-consider the explosion of research into neu- roscience, or religious pronouncements on sexuality. But we too may have set the bar ambiguously high (Irvine 2010); perhaps it's inherent in invoking such broad terminology at the outset.In the first few pages of Nature, Science, and Religion, the editor, Catherine Tucker, notes the impasse be- tween humanistic scholarship that takes both religion and science seriously in the context of human-envi- ronment relations, and scientific, management-based environmental scholarship that discounts religion as a relevant-or methodologically tractable-force. Her desire to bring this scholarship together led to a School for Advanced Research-sponsored seminar in August 2009 that gathered contributors for a week in Santa Fe. The introduction by Tucker and Adrian Ivakhiv lays out well the multivalent notions of nature, sci- ence, and religion, as well as their messy interactions in socioecological contexts. This is a welcome departure from much of the earlier literature on religion and ecology (e.g., Tucker and Grim 1994, Callicott 1997), where the tone seems to be more univocal in claiming some common and laudable thread of ecospirituality running through the diverse traditions of the world.The remaining essays are refreshingly interactive, frequently citing each other and hearkening back to shared experiences in Santa Fe. Chapter two explores the successful interweaving of religion and environ- mentalism in the context of Brazil's Atlantic forest. Chapter three considers spiritual warfare in the U.S. and Papua New Guinea, and how science and nature became variably (dis)enchanted as a result. Chapter four notes how desiccation theory, a largely discred- ited scientific idea linking deforestation and climate, has been appropriated in strikingly different ways in Mexico. Chapter five, also based in Mexico, advances the notion of moral ecologies as a means for indig- enous peoples to link spirituality with environmental activism. Chapter six examines religious syncretism in Honduras as a positive response to changing scientific knowledge and agro-ecological realities. Chapter seven considers reforestation efforts in Guatemala, and the positive effect of indigenous knowledge and ritual.Chapter eight addresses mountain climbing in Japan via two contrasting models: one of mastery over, and the other of veneration for, nature. Chapter nine considers faith in a nonreligious context as trust in the process of water-related negotiations in Costa Rica and Brazil. …