Olivia Strittmatter - Religious Ecology

April 9, 2020

From topic of my choosing 3

This blog post is number three out of the five on my personal topic, religion and ecology. The third article that I’m going to cover is a short article followed by a couple links to encyclopedia pages by multiple authors for further research. I will add the link to the article at the bottom of this blog. 

Religious ecology is the values, attitures, and practices of religions and their relationships with nature. Also called spiritual ecology, it depicts ways to interact with the environment that are respectful and appreciative. There are five main approaches to religious ecology are: “(1) identifying theological approaches to nature within the world’s religions traditions; (2) intersecting with the earlier field of environmental ethics that arose from within Western philosophy; (3) highlighting practices for religious environmentalism on the ground; (4) responding to specific issues such as climate change, environmental justice, food security, and toxicities; and (5) drawing on the insights of artists and nature writers articulating the complexity of nature.” In other words, they’re encouraging changes to positive relationships with nature, rather than the capitalistic and anthropocentric relationship that man has had with nature for the past 1-2 hundred years. This area of study came about between 1996-1998, and is becoming more and more popular with the growing environmental crises such as global climate change, deforestation, and ocean acidification. Overall it is a way of orienting religions, that are not nature-based, with nature and the universe as a whole. 

I feel like this relates to one of our topics that we covered earlier in the year. We talked about the Cosmos as if it were a circle, so if we take that format and change “Cosmos” to “nature” we have a circle of nature and the environment. A lot of modern, monotheistic religions tend to think of humans as “above” or “outside” of nature, rather than seeing themselves as part of nature. I think that if all religions became more ecocentric that there would be some major political changes that would ultimately benefit the entire planet, and the people as well.

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