My work focuses on the relationship between the earth and the sacred. Such a focus represents a new line of inquiry in contemporary intellectual life. While science and technology have traditionally been seen as the natural allies in ecological understanding, recent scholarship in the humanities notes the importance of religious worldviews in shaping attitudes toward the environment. For those visitors to my page unaware of this emerging discipline, I hope here to introduce you to religion and ecology, a promising new field of inquiry. This innovative subdiscipline focuses on how different religious traditions have shaped human beings' fundamental outlook on the environment in ancient and modern times. The world's religions ask basic questions about the cosmos that share deep affinities with the science of ecology. Both thought systems -- religion and ecology -- are concerned with the place of human beings within the general cosmic order. Noting this affinity between religion and ecology, the intellectual wager of this discipline is that the often unknown wellsprings of our perspectives on the environment must be tapped if we are to understand adequately how human beings have conceived of their place in the natural world.
The approach of religion and ecology is to look at the religious scriptures, myths, narratives, and moral systems that are largely responsible for the fundamental mindsets human persons bring to their understanding of the natural world. We live in a time of environmental crisis; it behooves us to make sense of the origins of the crisis by studying the basic worldviews, many of which are religiously informed, that ground ecological thought and practice. Methodologically speaking, then, religion and ecology is an exercise in worldview analysis: through the rigorous study of historic and contemporary religious texts, it seeks to explain human beings' basic predispositions toward the earth that are rooted in primordial religious beliefs and practices.
As might be imagined, religious perspectives about the material world, honed over four millennia, are inherently complicated. While some traditions valorize the natural order as a place of divine presence and therefore worthy of respect and protection, other traditions look beyond the natural order to a higher order still to come that effectively devalues the earthly cosmos as unrelated -- or even inimical -- to the values of the world beyond. It is these primordially vexed cosmic beliefs that generate much of the historic and contemporary confusion about the "proper" role of human beings within the wider biosphere. The profound theological questions posed by most if not all human cultures are now seen as questions that have direct bearing on ecological understanding. Questions such as, Are human beings part of or beyond nature? Do human beings have obligations to other life forms? Does the cosmos have an inherent purpose or function? are questions that are alternately religious, moral, and ecological at the same time.
In part, then, religion and ecology analyzes the deep ambiguities about the environment that run like buried fault lines within religious worldviews. But today I would like to stress two critical baseline convictions about nature that can be extrapolated from the worldviews of most religious communities. These baseline convictions are: (1) A core belief in the Sacred (God, the Real, the One, etc.) as that which binds together all living things in a global web of biotic interdependence. And (2) the concomitant ethical ideal of working toward the healing of endangered communities of species whenever they suffer ecological degradation. While the world's religions are not always consistent with themselves on these two points, it is this combination of sacred worldview and ethical idealism that runs like a "green thread" through a wide variety of religious traditions. For example, this "green thread" can be traced in the creation story in the Hebrew Bible where all species possess inherent worth as the handiwork of the Creator; in the Christian idea of the Holy Spirit, the animating power of life in the universe who unifies and sustains all things; in the Chinese doctrine of Ch'i -- the vital force within nature that dynamically integrates all forms of life into common flow patterns; and in the Amerindian imagery of the earth as the Great Mother, which entails the values of care and respect for the "body" of humankind's common planetary parent. Regular attention to these baseline convictions -- in their unity and sometimes confusing and contradictory variety -- provides rough thematic coherence for this exciting new field of inquiry.
The newly arising field of religion and ecology has its origins in a seminal article by then-UCLA historian Lynn White entitled "The Historic Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis" published in Science in 1967. White argues that Christianity in particular, in its war against the earth-centered pagan religions of pre-Christian Europe, bears a disproportionate burden for causing the current ecological crisis. According to White, ancient and medieval Christians taught that the natural world is not charged with sacred presence; it is not a place where tree nymphs and water sprites make their habitation. God (or the gods) are not nature deities; rather, God is a sky-God divorced from nature who lives in a heavenly realm far removed from the muck and mire of earthly affairs. Historically, then, Christianity has helped to sacralize humankind's exploitative treatment of nature, because if natural objects are dead matter and not imbued with the Spirit (or spirits) of divine presence, then such objects can be used and abused to serve human ends.
While White is to be commended for being the intellectual progenitor of modern-day religion and ecology, I believe his indictment of Christianity is only partly accurate. One of the things scholars who work in religion and ecology have learned to do is to strive for nuance and complexity in their analyses of the ecological attitudes buried within the worldviews of different religious traditions. In the case of Christianity, while it has been at times openly hostile to earth-centered thought and practice it has also been the bearer of remarkably rich understandings of an intimate God-world relationship where nature is valorized as God's good creation for the enjoyment and nurture of all living things and not a sink hole of dumb matter emptied of divine presence. Contrary to White, therefore, let me make two brief concluding comments about the ecological potential of Christian thought.
(A) Incarnation. One can catch a glimpse of a type of earth-loving Christianity in the central doctrine of what Christians call the "incarnation," the belief that God became a human being in the person of Jesus. Insofar as God enfleshes Godself in Jesus the message of Christianity is that God is green: God loves all things earthly, fleshy and material because God decided to become a body. Contrary to White's anti-nature assessment of Christianity, the fundamental teaching of Christianity is that God is an earth-being whose mission, in the body and person of Jesus, is to heal the broken bodies and wounded spirits of other earth-beings as they journey toward spiritual health and physical well being.
(B) The Spirit. Finally, the notion of the Spirit in Christianity is a potent ecological symbol. Traditionally, Christians have believed that God manifests Godself in three forms or persons -- Father, Son, and Holy Spirit --which they refer to as the Trinity. In actual practice, however, Christianity generally is a binary religion and it has forgotten about the role of the Spirit in the renewal and sustenance of the created order. In the Bible, the privileged source of Christian belief and practice, the Spirit is figured as a carnal, creaturely life-form always already interpenetrated by the material world. Granted, the term "Spirit" for most of us conjures the image of a ghostly, shadowy nonentity. But the biblical texts stand as a countertestimony to this conventional mindset because they are awash with rich imagery of the Spirit borrowed directly from the natural world. In fact, the four traditional elements of natural, embodied life -- earth, air, water, and fire -- are constitutive of the Spirit's biblical reality as an enfleshed being who ministers to the whole creation God has made for the refreshment and joy of all beings.
Numerous biblical passages attest to the foundational role of the four basic elements regarding the biocentric identity of the Spirit. (1) As earth, the Spirit is both the divine dove, with an olive branch in its mouth, that brings peace and renewal to a broken and divided world (Gen. 8:11, Matt. 3:16, John 1:32), and a fruit bearer, such as a tree or vine, that yields the virtues of love, joy, and peace in the life of the disciple. (2) As air, the Spirit is both the vivifying breath that animates all living things (Gen. 1:2, Ps. 104:29-30) and the prophetic wind that brings salvation and new life to those it indwells (Judges 6:34, John 3:6-8, Acts 2:1-4). (3) As water, the Spirit is the living water that quickens and refreshes all who drink from its eternal springs (John 4:14, 7:37-38). (4) And as fire, the Spirit is the purgative fire that alternately judges evildoers and ignites the prophetic mission of the early church (Matt. 3:11-12, Acts 2:1-4).
In the Bible, the Spirit is not a wraithlike being separated from matter but an earth creature like all other created things made up of the four cardinal substances that compose the physical universe. In addition to doing relatively objective worldview analysis, one of the burdens of religion and ecology is propose healthy green models for ecologically sustainable thought and practice in a world under siege. Like the idea of incarnation, the doctrine of God as Earth Spirit in Christianity is a potent theological resource for enabling just such thought and practice.
