I began this study by suggesting that explanatory power can be achieved by deploying a flexible definition of religion as an analytic strategy. I also indicated that it does not matter to me whether anyone concludes that religion is a good term for the types of experiences, perceptions, values, and practices that I have described and called dark green religion.
I chose the trope dark green religion for several reasons. An important one is that it has not been used before, so it has no baggage, positive or negative, and hopefully no obvious meaning that would preclude my ability to give it a useful, operational definition. A second reason is that by adding the modifier dark I could through wordplay present a useful double meaning—dark as in a deep shade of green, involving a belief in the intrinsic value of nature, and dark as in perilous, evoking some people’s fear of places without light. I hope this terminology has served its function.
This explanation made, I wish to say I feel no ownership nor do I have an expectation the phrase will be useful beyond this study. This is in part because I think there may be, thinking long term, more useful tropes for the phenomena I have tried to explain and characterize in this book. It seems to me that there are several candidates. One is Pantheism, but I do not think this would be apt. Its etymological roots are too intimately connected to the belief in or study of god. Even though some dark green religions might consider the earth as, literally, divine, not all of them do. Better candidates are deep ecology, Paganism, and nature religion.
I did not want to use deep ecology because it has been so closely associated with the philosophy of Arne Naess and the politics of radical environmentalism, and because some proponents of deep ecology reject the idea that it has anything to do with religion. I felt these facts would constrain the broader field of view I wanted to provide.
I did not want to use Paganism because of the ongoing negative baggage the term has in many cultures and because many involved in contemporary Paganism are polytheistic and believe in nonmaterial divine beings, which is not essential to the phenomena I sought to illuminate. I thought, therefore, that using the term Paganism could be confusing. Nevertheless, all four types of dark green religion are found among those who consider themselves Pagan. In these pages I have shown how James Lovelock and Henry David Thoreau expressed affinity for Paganism, an understanding that has something to do with reveling in the wonders of nature and having reverence for them. So it might just be that Paganism is best suited, in the long term, to represent the phenomena described in this book—precisely because of the associations it provokes (and here I mean those associations that, like Thoreau and Lovelock assumed, are not pejorative).
I did not want to use the term nature religion in part because Catherine Albanese used it in her important book Nature Religion in America, defining it more broadly than what I had in mind. In this volume, I wanted to limit my focus to those who consider nature to be sacred in some way. She used nature religion to refer more broadly to religions in which nature was an important reference point and symbolic center. Since her book is well known to scholars, I thought it might introduce confusion to use her term. I think, however, that it may be a good candidate for referring to what I have distinguished as nature-as-sacred religions. This is an understanding commonly evoked in people’s minds when they hear the term nature religion, and so on that score it is amenable. Nature religion has the added advantage of lacking the pejorative associations that Paganism calls up in some minds. If scholars use nature religion to refer to religions that consider nature sacred, however, they will need clarify their own, governing definition.
Scholarly tropes are not magic and nobody owns them. Neither are definitions. The key is to be as clear as possible in the hopes that the language chosen will illuminate the world.