Mary Evelyn Tucker

We’re talking about spiritual ecology, which is growing in interest, vibrancy, and relevance. We’re going to start by asking: What is spiritual ecology, and what is religious naturalism?

Carol Wayne White

Religious naturalism is an emergent worldview based in an understanding of reality informed by scientific studies, religious values, and philosophical ideas. It promotes a view in which nature is the ultimate reality. In doing so, religious naturalism dethrones humans from thinking we’re at the center of reality, and it has intrinsic ecological, social, and theoretical implications for how we think, feel, and act.

Vijaya Nagarajan

For me, religion and ecology are related to spirituality and ecology. Religion we tend to think of as a kind of box that has edges and is constrained in terms of definitions and practices; whereas spirituality and ecology are much more like an open box, where the many different tools that we find in religious traditions all over the world can be put together. It’s like the windows are open in the spirituality and ecology buildings—the doors are open, the wind is allowed to come in, you can hear the bird calls, and you can see snakes in the grass. The entire kinship of life is visible in that worldview. 

Part of my research recently has been on Hinduism and climate. I’m trying to think about 5,000 years of Hinduism and imagine it as a spiritual tradition that has tools we can use to understand ourselves in relation to the larger kinship of the world. 

Dan Smyer Yu

I grew up in China and my ancestors are Rema, which is a very small ethnic group in western China, the eastern Tibetan plateau, in the ecological border zone. This is the basis of my interest in religion, ecology, and spiritual ecology.

Besides being a scholar, I’m also a regenerative subsistence farmer. Four years ago, when the pandemic started and I started working from home, I realized there’s something else I need to do besides academic writing. I think the soil matters, the trees matter. So my wife and I decided to have a piece of a small farmland, about five acres, and we started to do our work. It’s slow progress, but we are planting seeds of change and hope something fruitful will come.

Spiritual ecology can be synonymous to what Mary Evelyn calls religious ecology, or what the UN refers to as faith-based ecology, or in general could be interfaith ecotheology. The theology could be any religion.

Monotheistic religions tend to treat divinity as otherworldly. I’m leaning toward looking at the spiritual state of Earth as a series of constant, animistic fluxes as a part of a pan-human Indigenous knowledge of life on Earth. Animistic means the intangible essence of life embodies itself in myriad physical forms.

MET

How is this relevant for our present circumstances?

CWW

As a religious naturalist, I define spirituality as a mode of reflecting, experiencing, and envisioning one’s relationality with all that is.

Spirituality is a vital awareness that pervades being alive. Because humans are natural organisms, we are part of this biotic community. And the ecological implication is that, when we have this embodied awareness that we’re material, relational beings, then we have some important actions to take. Ecology and spirituality have never divorced from each other because even human bodies are ecosystems. Everything can be part of this living entity that we call Earth.

VN

We need to restore, reinvent, and reimagine languages of wholeness because we have, in the last 500 to 700 years, split ourselves from the natural world. Our language splits us from the natural world and keeps those artificial barriers up.

So part of my work has been trying to see: How does one convey the concept of the commons? It’s part of that vocabulary of spiritual ecology. Every religious and spiritual tradition around the world has these ways of tying the very small and the very big together. How do we bring those vocabularies back into the present so that we can see how the highways connect with trees or the air?

I’ve also been very preoccupied with understanding waste, because our incapacity to see waste has led to multiple problems. As Amitav Ghosh said once, “The problem of climate is the problem of waste.”

MET

Ghosh ends his book The Great Derangement with this call for a spiritual ecology, even citing Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato si’.

DSY

In terms of the relevance of a spiritual ecology, let me start with the UN’s [idea of] sustainable development. To me, it’s kind of a failed idea. It was proposed in 1987. But when we look at the environmental track record of the entire planet, we have more crises than ever. It’s time for a spiritual ecology, because sustainable development is a very science-based idea about the so-called carrying capacity of the Earth in the material sense.

Spiritual ecology tells us a different story of the Earth, and allows us to recognize that our reverence for the sentience and sacredness of the Earth is the basis for the mutual flourishing of humans and nonhumans. I want to see sustainable happiness, not sustainable development. Because whatever we extracted from the earth, [it was because] we wanted to make ourselves happy.

In terms of how we might shape spiritual ecology, I think we can start with our spiritual relations with the Earth. The purpose is to correlate the environment and ethics with local, traditional ways of sustainable living. That allows us spiritual ecologists to translate whatever is stored in religious texts, traditions, and customs into publicly accessible environmental language.

CWW

One thing that spiritual ecology does is introduce a type of language that has often been marginalized by contemporary scientific approaches to the Anthropocene. Religious voices, perspectives, and methodologies are often overshadowed by the scientific. It’s not either/or; it’s about adding more voices to the conversation.

Rachel Carson writes, “I believe that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us, the less taste we shall have for destruction.”

There’s this fascinating reciprocity, and it avoids a managerial model of environmentalism that thinks that we’re separate from the thing we’re trying to save. Religious naturalism rejects that “we are trying to do something for you” attitude. The very thing we’re talking about, we’re a part of.

MET

I have lived within a very scientistic environment for a long time at Yale School of the Environment. And I just want to interject briefly that [the ideas of] animal consciousness and the livingness of trees and plants are coming from scientists too, now. This is an exciting moment.

CWW

In the field of botany, Robin Wall Kimmerer and a number of others have provided wonderful language for forms of knowledge that have been diminished with this march towards scientism.

VN

Last year I was invited to teach ethics in the engineering program at the University of San Francisco. I left engineering school because it didn’t have ethics. I fought with my deans at the time, saying, “We have to have ecology and ethics and equity in the designing of the engineering systems themselves.” They laughed at me. So 45 years later, to have a chance to bring morality and ethics from several religious traditions into the training of first-semester engineering students was just thrilling.

And the book that made the most difference was Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book. The levels of awareness that her writing helped my engineering students achieve was breathtaking.

The idea of the gift is so central to the idea of the commons, and the idea of waste. It’s like Gandhi said more than 100 years ago: If India starts behaving like Britain, it’ll be the whole Earth that is stripped. And that’s what’s happened. The whole world has become the colonizing empire. We are stripping the world like locusts. How do we jump out of that path?

Part of that requires us to see the gifts that make us and that we make in the world. It’s hard for people to understand because they think of commodified gift-giving. You have to unpack what “gift” actually means from a non-commodified perspective to be able to even perceive the gifts around us.

DSY

The United Nations Environment Programme’s Faith for Earth Coalition statistics say that 80% of the world’s population is religious. What does it mean that these religious constituencies hold ecological knowledge, written or oral?

I have been working on a theory that I call the affective consciousness of the Earth. The biosphere is the most culturally vibrant sphere of the Earth. Cultural diversity and biodiversity are in direct [proportion]. When one side decreases, the other side decreases. By connecting the physical Earth with the spiritual Earth, or the animistic Earth, we are able to see that the Earth has a life of her own that interweaves everything and everyone together.

This interior force of the Earth is incarnated in different exterior bodies on the Earth’s surface. Humans are interconnected with the interior force of the Earth through the language of spirituality and religious practices.

CWW

Alfred North Whitehead is another major thinker who, during the 1930s, brought forth an ecological understanding of reality. The basic metaphor that Whitehead used was that reality is basically about change.

Rachel Carson also wrote, “There’s nothing static about an ecosystem, something is always happening, energy and materials are being received, transformed, given off. The living maintains itself in a dynamic rather than static balance.” There’s no stasis in the universe at all. Even in what we call nonorganic entities, there’s always something happening—think of electrons that are jumping orbits. When we begin to understand these beautiful elements of scientific and philosophical study, they amplify our ecological understanding.

MET

I’ve had discussions with scientists, like Ursula Goodenough, who would say the difference between the animate and the so-called “inanimate” world is a strict line. But even the rocks are changing—erosion, plate tectonics, and so on.

VN

 In my book Feeding a Thousand Souls: Women, Ritual, and Ecology in India, I was working on this incredible mandala tradition all over India—400 million Hindu women do this some time during the year, where they make designs on the household threshold with rice flour. Hundreds of women told me, “We do this every morning as our first ritual act of the day, before sunrise, to honor the Earth goddess and to ask for forgiveness for all the actions that we are about to do that could harm her and all the actions that we have done in the past that have harmed her.” 

Ethics becomes woven in very closely, like a piece of knitting, with aesthetics. How do we create beauty that has ethics embedded within it? I call it embedded ecologies. We are swimming in a sea of unraveled threads that have been undone by language, by actions, by rituals of modernity. We need to recall, through ritual action that we do on a daily basis, that we want to go towards the flourishing of life. 

CWW

This aesthetic-ethics phrase—I use the word wonder. Wonder has the capacity to mitigate against nihilism and indifference and knit the alienated forms of relationality together. 

I want to finish with a line from Robin Kimmerer. She says, “Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.” That’s the type of ethics I think that can be generated from this spirituality. 

DSY

To me, it’s also about Earth speaking through us.

CWW

We’re called to participate in life as a species, and we have a role to play. It’s the grandeur of life itself that inspires and motivates us. Whatever vocabulary we’re using, we’re really talking about how beautiful, gorgeous, and fascinating life is—and we’re a small part of it. If we can give back what has been given to us, we’ll be seeing a different world.