Religion and Ecology: Towards a Communion of Creatures (original) (raw)

Lynn White Jnr.’s much quoted and variously anthologised article “The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis, ” first published in Science in 1967, constitutes one of the earliest forays into the field that has since become known as the Environmental Humanities. White’s article effectively reframed the consideration of environmental problems, hitherto taken to be the preserve of the natural sciences, as pertaining also to the cultural realm of beliefs, values, and the narratives that bear them, by tracing the emergence within medieval Catholicism of what subsequently became the dominant ethos of human transcendence of, and mastery over, ‘nature’ within euro-western modernity. Linking a shift in the reception of a canonical text (the Bible) to the development of new relations and technologies of production (the heavy iron plow) in response to particular environmental conditions (the clay soils of Northern Europe), White’s analysis not only raised new questions about the aetiology of ecological crisis: it also modelled a new methodology that recognised non-human entities as historical agents. Importantly for the purposes of this chapter, White also argued that “since the roots of our crisis are so largely religious, the remedy must also be essentially religious, whether we call it that or not.” (1996: 14) While I consider the causality of most major environmental, or ecosocial, problems to be more multi-facetted than White’s punchy conclusion allows, I am persuaded that the study of religion and ecology, as I will outline in this chapter, has much to contribute to the work of the environmental humanities. Moreover, the growing endeavours that have since been initiated, not only by religious scholars, but also by religious leaders and communities, some in the context of inter-faith dialogue and activism, to “rethink and refeel our nature and destiny” (1996: 14) with a view to countering environmental degradation, suggests that religion has a valuable role to play in advancing sustainability and moving towards what I propose to call (with reference in particular to Christian ecotheology) the “communion of creatures”. Tragically, however, this is occurring at a time when the rise of militant religious fundamentalism is escalating inter-specific violence, reducing our capacity to work together to address the major sustainability challenges that we face globally, and helping to bring religion per se into disrepute. As I will demonstrate here, then, countering fundamentalism is a further key component in the ecological renovation of religious thought and practice.