The New Ecozoic Reader

It is a deep honor to offer these words in introduction to this powerful and timely volume. I have had the privilege of witnessing how the convergence of religious and ecological worldviews can shape the future of our planet. This issue of The New Ecozoic Reader carries that spirit forward with remarkable clarity and courage.

During our time of proliferating ecological crises, the academic field and moral force of religion and ecology are matters of urgent importance for any effort to respond to the myriad challenges presented by these crises. We hope that this issue is a source of information and inspiration that can support anyone seeking integral community in our ecological age.

In the early 1990s, when we first began to think of what we as historians of religions might contribute to our environmental challenges, it was becoming clear that the spiritual depth and moral force of religions could facilitate lasting changes. As students of Indigenous religions (John) and East Asian religions (Mary Evelyn) we saw great potential in these traditions for understanding and promoting broadened ecological sensibilities.

The field of religion and ecology developed in stages, and distinctly in diverse local, national, and global contexts. From the beginning it represented multireligious and multidisciplinary initiatives. Today, in the fifty years of development and expansion, it is impossible to categorize the field of religions and ecology, as it is vast, robust, active, and impactful.

The environmental philosophy or movement known as deep ecology is a hugely popular form of environmental thinking that informs a large number of environmental movements worldwide, at least in its moderate form. It is often said to have a spiritual quality.

Over the past several decades, the emerging transdisciplinary fields of religion and ecology, religion and nature, and spiritual ecology have reshaped thinking about human-Earth relations, exploring the complexity of attitudes and practices related to the nonhuman world in both inherited and emerging religions and spiritualities.

The emergence of a new field of study is anything but linear. This is certainly the case when it comes to the field now known as Religion and Ecology, or Religion and Nature. How one narrates that emergence matters. Here I want to discuss at least four different branches, or more accurately nodes, of this rhizomatic field of study.

Environmental degradation and climate change highlight the unsustainability of modern practices, necessitating a reevaluation of our interaction with nature. This crisis has driven a shift towards holistic ethical frameworks that emphasize interconnectedness and the moral imperative to protect our planet.

I first put the words religion and ecology together while I was pacing the stacks in the basement of the Brigham Young University library. As an anthropology major, I was interested in how culture shaped ecologies, and as I struggled to craft my own ecological spirituality out of obstinate stone of my Mormon religious upbringing, these two words lit a fire in my life.

In this essay I offer my reflections on the field of religion and ecology from two different angles. I consider a fork in the road of human civilization and, indeed, of the whole Earth community. On one side an Ecozoic era is ahead, and on the other side a Technozoic era. To start, let me explain those terms, which are likely familiar to many of the readers of this special issue.

In October 2020, a group of solemn figures dressed in red gowns and veils, their faces painted white, silently processed over a fire-scarred landscape of ash and dead trees in southern California. They were members of the Red Rebel Brigade, associated with Extinction Rebellion Los Angeles, at the Lake Fire burn site in the Angeles National Forest, north of Santa Clarita, California.

On the evening of the full moon, nineteen of us ride out of London, Ohio, heading southwest on the Prairie Grass Trail toward South Charleston. It’s a beautiful ten-mile ride. The trail threads through woods, meadows, cultivated farm fields, near homesteads with roadside ditches full of water this June night.

My formation in relation with Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and Thomas Berry began with assigned reading of Teilhard at Barnard College in 1970. Reading in the lofty Columbia library of his vision of all creation, I knew that I had found an articulation of an insight that centered me.

In Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home, Pope Francis promotes an integral ecology, which intends to account for the entanglement of environmentalism and social justice. Throughout the encyclical, Francis compellingly addresses the intersection of ecological degradation and the plight of people experiencing poverty.

Ecowomanism begins with the contemplative step of noticing Earth, the Earth within ourselves, our sacred bodies, minds, and spirits—and also the sacredness of Earth in each other as interconnected beings.

This brief essay will touch on three aspects of the current ecological dilemma, followed by reflections on two conferences that I attended and on the ongoing important role of education.

Writing as one of the initial seed-sowers of religion and ecology in Asia, my story of the spread and indigenization of this interdisciplinary field began with Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim two decades ago in the manner of brainstorming, interdisciplinary conferences, summer schools, and publishing workshops for graduate students and early-career scholars.

Rong religion has been of interest to colonial administrators, ethnographers, and anthropologists ever since they set foot in the Sikkim and Darjeeling Himalaya. Upon arrival in these borderlands, they were surprised to find a group of people who did not practice either Buddhism or Hinduism–the world religions with which they were familiar.

What kind of worldview or religious orientation does it take to make an entire planet uninhabitable? While many think it is our dependence on fossil fuels and the population explosion that has brought us to this point of human destruction, our contention is that these problems have religious foundations which were created and continue to be used by empires as a means to hold dominion over people and the Earth.

Some words work really hard. This can be rewarding for both the words and their speakers, hearers, readers, users, and recipients. “Animism” (the word) does a lot of work because it carries a range of associations, some of which need to be teased out and others that must be strongly challenged.

In this short essay, I consider a bright spot among democracy’s tremulous prospects today: the emergent discourse around the potential for a multispecies democracy. To this point, arguments for direct democratic representation for nonhumans (voting rights, say) have not been sustained.

The humanities have turned. Or perhaps—like a plant—they have spiraled, curved, circumnutated outwards and up, grasping more of the world as they grow. Like plants bending towards the sun, the “nonhuman turn” enacts a Copernican revolution away from what many long considered the exclusive center of subjectivity: humans.

I grew up driving across I-90 from eastern South Dakota to the Black Hills every summer. Along the way I absorbed “Green Religion.” Surrounded by ecological and geological wonders, I believed that the best cathedrals are amidst the pines and sensed that marvels like unimpeded star-speckled skies can evoke religious devotion and scientific curiosity together.

The writing is on the wall. The wall itself is the north wall of the Santa Fe farmer’s market, and the writing is Wendell Berry’s from 2003: “To cherish what remains of Earth and foster its renewal is our only hope.” It could have been Terry Tempest Williams’s two decades later. “Before we can save this world we are losing, we must first learn how to savor what remains.”

Backgrounds of featured authors, arranged alphabetically