Abstract
Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, this essay examines how the local Jehovah’s Witnesses’ response to the current ecological crisis on the Galápagos Islands has produced a distinct form of religious environmentalism. Specifically, I argue that the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ vision of the ultimate future informs action rather than despair—contrary to what is often assumed about millenarian beliefs. This essay joins voices in Christian feminist and eco-theology interested in reclaiming eschatology for its imaginative valence. Yet, unlike invocations for hope that lack consideration of their viability, my ethnographic approach contributes to this literature with a view of the practical reverberations of eschatology. Further, current discussions about ecological unraveling, often couched around the concept of the Anthropocene, have reinforced expert-driven, techno-scientific measures that exclude other forms of knowledge production and practical interventions. If such worries continue to motivate a paradigm of conservation that exclude locals, my essay shows how the local Jehovah’s Witnesses promote a valuable alternative form of environmentalism, on the Galápagos and elsewhere.
Highlights
The Fate and Faith of the WorldSince the 1990s, the field of religion and ecology has investigated the role of religion in shaping people’s relationship with the environment and, with increasing urgency, their understanding of and responses to the global environmental crisis
Claims that religions can produce stewardship to better address climate change have multiplied over the years (Grim and Tucker 2014; Jenkins 2013; Mickey 2015; Palmer and Finlay 2003)—but so, too, have critiques
Environmentally friendly doctrines often coexist with contrasting messages within the same religion. In her analysis of climate change denial in the United States, Marisa Ronan argues that dominionism, the precept of humanity’s duty to “fill and subdue the earth,” has rendered many US evangelical congregations refractory to calls for environmental awareness, even those originating within evangelical groups (Ronan 2017)
Summary
The Fate and Faith of the WorldSince the 1990s, the field of religion and ecology has investigated the role of religion in shaping people’s relationship with the environment and, with increasing urgency, their understanding of and responses to the global environmental crisis. Celia was taking advantage of the time lag between the design of the new two temporal domains: from a people-less past to its human-inhabited future. Celia showed me plant species that had come from the mainland and spread without human help, some
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