Religion and Ecology

Abstract

Religious or spiritual ecology refers to attitudes, values, and practices regarding nature within the world’s religions and outside of those traditions. Religious or spiritual ecology identifies ways of interacting with nature that inspire human responses of respect, protection, and appropriate uses of nature. This bibliography highlights the literature in the field of study called “religion and ecology.” This field is in dialogue with other approaches to environmental studies from the social sciences, such as social ecology, political ecology, cultural ecology, industrial ecology, and ecological economics. This field began with the Harvard conference series on Religions of the World and Ecology at the Harvard Center for the Study of World Religions from 1996 to 1998. During this period and in the ensuing years, historians of religion and theologians began a process of retrieving, reevaluating, and reconstructing religious traditions in light of the growing environmental crisis. This humanistic study of ways of valuing nature, being in harmony with nature, and of ethically protecting nature is seen as a complement to the empirical investigation of nature from a scientific perspective. This work has been fostered by the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology. The field of religious or spiritual ecology has several approaches including: (1) identifying theological approaches to nature within the world’s religions traditions; (2) intersecting with the earlier field of environmental ethics that arose from within Western philosophy; (3) highlighting practices for religious environmentalism on the ground; (4) responding to specific issues such as climate change, environmental justice, food security, biodiversity loss, and toxicities; and (5) drawing on the insights of artists and nature writers articulating the complexity of nature. This work in religious and spiritual ecology is opening up the field of religious studies to a broader understanding of what religion is and how it functions beyond Western categories of interpretation. Monotheism in its various Abrahamic forms does not exhaust the nature of religion. Thus we can now see religion through the lens of religious ecology as a way of orienting humans to the universe, grounding them in the community of nature and humans, nurturing them in Earth’s fecund processes, and transforming them into their deeper cosmological selves. This gives fresh meaning to the Latin term religio “to bind back,” which suggests a return to an awareness of and a commitment to the fundamental wellsprings of life.