By some accounts, the juncture between ecology and religion is just a few years old: its public connection can be traced to 1986, when the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) helped to organize a gathering of religious leaders from major world faiths at Assisi, Italy, to enlist their support to protect and preserve the world's environment.
In reality, the association can be traced to the dawn of recorded history. A new volume, entitled Worldviews and Ecology and published as an issue of the prestigious Bucknell Review, shows how the "worldviews" promoted and nurtured by the various world religions throughout history have been instrumental in shaping humanity's relationship with nature.
Indeed, as environmentalists ponder how best to motivate the changes in attitudes and activities that will be necessary to create a sustainable world civilization, the subject of faith and religious belief almost unavoidably comes up.
"As subjects of debate and appeal, cosmology, ethics, religion, faith, the spiritual, and moral responsibility turn up with increasing frequency as the ecocrisis deepens," writes theologian Larry L. Rasmussen in one of the essays presented in the book. "It is as though ecocrisis consciousness and religious consciousness are, in our time, like vast rivers which, though they arose in different terrain, now converge with one another in common channels."
In analyzing the various streams of this merging flow, Worldviews and Ecology provides a tremendous service. A collection of 18 essays by religious and environmental scholars, the book offers a diverse and yet coherent sampling of the various strains of thought in the field of environmental ethics.
Divided roughly into three parts, the first two essays underscore the importance of revamping our worldview in relation to the environment. Writes Tu Wei-Ming, a professor of Chinese history and philosophy at Harvard University: "...by poisoning the air we breathe and the water we drink, in short, by degrading our environment, we are recklessly reducing the livability of our habitat to a point of no return. The necessity of a basic reorientation of our thought with a view toward a fundamental restructuring of our style of life is glaringly clear."
The second section offers a series of essays on how each of the world's major religions views the relationship between man and nature. Examined are the worldviews promoted not only by Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the Bahá'í Faith, Hinduism, and Buddhism, but also by native American spiritual traditions, Confucianism and Taoism, and Jainism.
For the most part, these essays take a scholarly overview of the basic teachings of each religion in relation to nature. They examine in brief what each faith's sacred writings have said, how theologians throughout history have interpreted those writings, and the actual record of activity by the followers of each religion in an environmental context.
In Jay McDaniel's essay on "A Christian Approach to Ecology," for example, he even-handedly considers how the biblical commands in Genesis to "be fruitful and multiply, and replenish the earth and subdue it and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moves upon the earth" have been interpreted as giving humanity a license to dominate and rule over nature -- a worldview that many say has given rise to the excesses that today so threaten the environment.
At the same time, McDaniel, a professor of environmental theology and world religions at Hendrix College, suggests that a more liberal interpretation of Christian theology can provide the underpinnings for a movement to "learn to feel the world as God feels it, with sensitivity to the intrinsic value of each and every life, and with delight in the sheer diversity of forms of life...."
The book's final section deals with the emergence of "contemporary ecological perspectives," offering a sampling of the worldviews proposed by such currents as the "deep ecology" movement, "ecofeminism," and the views of modern-day eco-theologians like Thomas Berry.
Each of these examinations also embrace the importance of considering the "spiritual dimension" to environmentalism. This despite the paradoxical rejection of traditional religion by many proponents of these movements. Observes Rasmussen: "many who now make their religious appeal [for the involvement of believers in conservation] public are not religiously observant themselves."
Charlene Spretnak writes that "the ecofeminist alternative to the Western patriarchal worldview of fragmentation, alienation, agonistic dualisms, and exploitative dynamics is a radical reconceptualization that honors holistic integration: interrelatedness, transformation, embodiment, caring, and love." These qualities, she says, are "simpatico with teachings of several Eastern and indigenous spiritual traditions...."
Ultimately, then, the crucial role of religion and faith as a key resource in the search for a new worldview that can guide and motivate the creation of a sustainable civilization becomes the dominant theme of this book.
That is precisely the theme presented by environmentalist Robert White in his contribution, "A Bahá'í Perspective on an Ecologically Sustainable Society."
White suggests that the writings and practices of the Bahá'í Faith, the youngest of the world's independent religions, offer a new vision and model for the creation of an ecologically sound global society.
"In the nineteenth century, Bahá'u'lláh stated that the revelation of religious truth is an ongoing, open-ended process that has animated humanity's development toward greater unity and consciousness," White writes. "Within this context, Bahá'u'lláh claimed that the role of revelation was to initiate a process of conscious unification on a planetary scale...
"The Bahá'í Faith, therefore, presents a unity
paradigm which reflects an altered understanding of the relationship
of parts to each other and to the whole," White continues.
"This spiritual and organic truth, once accepted, can release
the constructive energy that will be needed to make the far-reaching
structural changes required for fostering sustainable patterns
of development."