Environment

The Dualist Paradigm

Even before the emergence of modern environmentalism as a mainstream movement in the West, late-19th-century American naturalists such as John Muir and Aldo Leopold challenged the notion prevailing in Western culture that humanity was apart from, and not part of, nature. Leopold claimed that certain biblical passages had a negative impact on the environment because conservation was incompatible with the Abrahamic concept of land regarded as a commodity belonging to man. One biblical text he quoted to support this view is Genesis 1:28: “God blessed them and God said to them: ‘Be fertile and increase, fill the earth and master it; and rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and all the living creatures that creep on earth.'” The American poet Gary Snyder followed this stream of thought in the 1950s and was inspirational to the founders of the deep ecology movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s, in particular Arne Naess, a philosophy professor at the University of Oslo. Naess criticized Cartesian or scientific rational philosophy and the Judeo-Christian tradition, which he saw as justifying the subsuming of nature to man's destructive aims. Subsequent proponents of this approach, including New Age, neo-Pagan, and neo-Shamanist movements, have argued that the perception of nature as sacred is central to non-Western and non-Abrahamic traditions, especially [Page 349]indigenous cultures where people perceive themselves as part of nature and adhere to views of the cosmos where this split does not exist. According to this argument, traditional ways of living, including those that practice custodianship of the natural world, have been subjugated to a dualistic approach that in many cases accompanied colonialism. To replace the lack of critical spiritual connectivity between people, nature, and landscapes, radical ecology calls for a “new environmental paradigm” or an ecosophy—that is, a philosophical/ecological total view inspired by naturalism, Buddhism, and other nondualistic philosophies.

Alliance between World Religions and Environmentalists

In the context of the dualist controversy, some Christian churches began to address growing environmental and social challenges. They also responded to a pressing call for involvement on the part of less radical environmentalists who sought to gain the support of moral institutional authorities in view of grounding environmental issues in ethics. As of the mid-1970s, the World Council of Churches was the first religious organization to articulate a theological reflection on environmental destruction and social inequities around the centrality of the notion of creation and life. In 1992, at the time of the U.N. Earth Summit in Rio, the World Council of Churches facilitated a gathering of Christian leaders that issued a “Letter to the Churches” calling for attention to pressing ecojustice concerns. In addition to major conferences held by Christian churches, several interreligious meetings have been held, and various religious movements have engaged with the issue of environment. Some of these include the interreligious gatherings on the environment in Assisi in 1984 under the sponsorship of the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and in 1986 under the auspices of the Vatican. For its part, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has established an Interfaith Partnership for the Environment. Since 1995, an Alliance of Religion and Conservation has been active in England, while the National Religious Partnership for the Environment has organized Jewish and Christian groups around this issue in the United States. Religious groups have also contributed to the drafting of the Earth Charter. This new alliance of world religions and environmental conservation has resulted in culture-specific religious concepts of ecology and nature being increasingly mainstreamed in national and international environmental policies, in particular in the field of biodiversity conservation.

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