Inherited Land

The Changing Grounds of Religion and Ecology

Bauman, Bohannon

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9781630876241
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Religione

Religion and ecology has arrived. What was once a niche interest for a few academics concerned with environmental issues and a few environmentalists interested in religion has become an established academic field with classic texts, graduate programs, regular meetings at academic conferences, and growing interest from other academics and the mass media. Theologians, ethicists, sociologists, and other scholars are engaged in a broad dialogue about the ways religious studies can help understand and address environmental problems, including the sorts of methodological, terminological, and substantive debates that characterize any academic discourse.This book recognizes the field that has taken shape, reflects on the ways it is changing, and anticipates its development in the future. The essays offer analyses and reflections from emerging scholars of religion and ecology, each addressing her or his own specialty in light of two questions: (1) What have we inherited from the work that has come before us? and (2) What inquiries, concerns, and conversation partners should be central to the next generation of scholarship?The aim of this volume is not to lay out a single and clear path forward for the field. Rather, the authors critically reflect on the field from within, outline some of the major issues we face in the academy, and offer perspectives that will nurture continued dialogue.

1

The Tensions and Promises of Religion and Ecology’s Past, Present, and Future

Whitney A. Bauman, Richard R. Bohannon II, and Kevin J. O’Brien

Mountains and waters right now are the actualization of the ancient Buddha way. Each, abiding in its phenomenal expression, realizes completeness. Because mountains and waters have been active since before the Empty Eon, they are alive at this moment. Because they have been self since before form arose they are emancipation-realization.

—Dogen (1240)1

He showed me something small, about the size of a hazelnut, that seemed to lie in the palm of my hand as round as a tiny ball. I tried to understand the sight of it, wondering what it could possibly mean. The answer came: “This is all that is made.” I felt it was so small that it could easily fade to nothing; but again I was told, “This lasts and it will go on lasting forever because God loves it.”

—Julian of Norwich (1373)2

But I’m in the woods woods woods, & they are in me-ee-ee. The King tree & me have sworn eternal love—sworn it without swearing & I’ve taken the sacrament with Douglas Squirrel drank Sequoia wine, Sequoia blood, & with its rosy purple virtue of Sequoia juice . . . I wish I was so drunk & Sequoical that I could preach the green brown woods to all the juiceless world, descending from this divine wilderness like a John Baptist eating Douglas Squirrels & wild honey or wild anything, crying, Repent for the Kingdom of Sequoia is at hand.

—John Muir (1870)3

As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.

—Charles Darwin, On the Origins of Species (1859)4

What people do about their ecology depends on what they think about themselves in relation to things around them. Human ecology is deeply conditioned by beliefs about our nature and destiny—that is, by religion.

—Lynn White (1967)5

In the course of organizing this volume and the conference that pre- ceded it,6 the unity and diversity of our field both became strikingly clear. There is a coherent and growing group of scholars engaged in the productive and vitally important study of what many of us refer to as Religion and Ecology. However, there are remarkable differences not only in the methodologies we use and the disciplines we locate ourselves within, but also in the lineages of scholarship in which we place ourselves. We work with a broad range of texts, sources, and inspirations, and we see ourselves and our work within a diverse range of traditions. This book is written to celebrate and explore those differences, which enable us to have sustained, academic, and fruitful conversations about the intersection of religious and environmental issues.

The quotes above represent some of the diverse sources and the breadth of inspirations that contribute to this work. The Japanese Zen master Dogen’s Mountains and Waters Sutra builds on a tradition that was longstanding in Buddhism before he taught in the thirteenth century: teaching lessons about spiritual practice using examples from the natural world. This teaching emphasizes the importance of nature by identifying the mountains and waters as active, living selves who can share insight about the path to enlightenment. A century later, in another part of the world, the English mystic Julian of Norwich connected the religious to the natural in another way, envisioning the entirety of the cosmos in God’s palm, simultaneously emphasizing the majesty of the divine and the importance and fragility of the creation. John Muir came from a vastly different context in the nineteenth century, and no longer appeals to the language of any explicit religious tradition in explaining his experiences of nature. Yet he depends upon religious language to capture the transformations he experienced in his studies of the nonhuman world. Writing about the natural world around the same time, Charles Darwin generally did not appeal to explicitly religious language, but he nevertheless wrestled with the theological implications of his ideas about the origin of species and the evolving tree of life.

Each of these accounts demonstrates the broad truth of historian Lynn White’s assertion that there is a connection between the ways human beings relate to the nonhuman world and the faith traditions that inspire and structure thinking and beliefs. White’s essay has been used ever since it was published in 1967 to demonstrate that religion is a vital conversation partner in the project of understanding and wrestling with how human beings relate to the rest of the world.7 This assertion—that religion matters in environmental conversations—has been foundational to the field of Religion and Ecology, and it continues to be foundational for this book.

Along these lines, Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim assert that the environmental crisis:

. . . is not only the result of certain economic, political, and social factors. It is also a moral and spiritual crisis which, in order to be addressed, will require broader philosophical and religious understandings of ourselves as creatures of nature, embedded in life cycles and dependent upon ecosystems. Religions, thus, need to be reexamined in light of the current environmental crisis.8

This contention set the context for a groundbreaking series of books in the field that traced environmentalist themes and suggested environmentalist changes to Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Daoism, Hinduism, Indigenous Traditions, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, and Shinto. These books offered responses to the complex and enormous “environmental crisis” by examining and critiquing a selection of humanity’s “philosophical and religious understandings” of its relationships to the nonhuman world.

Tucker and Grim, the scholars they gathered in their ten volume series, and many other thinkers in the field of Religion and Ecology have succeeded in establishing two vital, foundational claims within religious studies and theology: first, there is a complex and wide-ranging environmental crisis, and, second, this crisis is at least in part a moral and spiritual issue. While some religious people may dismiss environmental degradation as a myth or an irrelevant distraction from their faith, these believers are well outside the mainstream. While some environmentalists may believe that religion is a backwards and problematic way of living in the world, they are encouraged to keep quiet by their movement’s leaders. Environmental degradation is widely recognized to involve moral and spiritual issues, and the leaders of moral and spiritual communities widely recognize that environmental degradation is real and requires a response.

Thus, over the last four decades, arguments from Religion and Ecology have convinced a wide range of religious leaders, with widely-heralded environmental statements emerging over the last twenty years from the Vatican, evangelical Christians, the Dalai Lama, Native American leaders, and many other religious authorities and communities.9 In response, many environmentalists who had previously identified themselves as secularists or pessimists about religion as a force for positive change have actively reached out to religious people and organizations, recruiting faith communities to join with and become part of their work.10

The occasion for this book is our awareness as emerging scholars in the field that these realities—that environmental degradation is widely accepted as real, and that the relationship between religion and environmental issues is generally understood—change the conversations scholars should have about these issues. These successes suggest that Religion and Ecology is developed, established, and matured enough to reflect on itself and to add new questions and concerns to the ones we inherit from the past. Such reflective questioning is the task of Inherited Land.

This is not a book written to replace the Religions of the World and Ecology series or to supersede those who created and work out of its impressive accomplishments. Rather, Inherited Land depends on that work and seeks to introduce it to readers who do not know this field even as we build upon it. Along those lines, we set this volume’s ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors
• Chapter 1: The Tensions and Promises of Religion and Ecology’s Past, Present, and Future
• Chapter 2: Nature Religion and the Problem of Authenticity
• Chapter 3: The Importance and Limits of Taking Science Seriously
• Chapter 4: What Traditions Are Represented in Religion and Ecology?
• Chapter 5: Opening the Language of Religion and Ecology
• Chapter 6: Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies in Religion and Ecology
• Chapter 7: Practically Natural
• Chapter 8: How Does It Feel to be an Environmental Problem?
• Chapter 9: Saving the World (and the People in It, Too)
• Chapter 10: Religion and Ecology on the Ground
• Chapter 11: Religion and the Urban Environment
• Chapter 12: The Buzzing, Breathing, Clicking, Clacking, Biting, Stinging, Chirping, Howling Landscape of Religious Studies1
• Conclusion