Since the publication of Rachael Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962, environmental alarm has intensified and become increasingly apocalyptic. Meanwhile, nature-related religion has been rekindled, invented, spread, and ecologized.1 A great deal of this religious creativity has been dark green, flowing from a deep sense of belonging to and connectedness in nature, while perceiving the earth and its living systems to be sacred and interconnected. Dark green religion is generally deep ecological, biocentric, or ecocentric, considering all species to be intrinsically valuable, that is, valuable apart from their usefulness to human beings. This value system is generally (1) based on a felt kinship with the rest of life, often derived from a Darwinian understanding that all forms of life have evolved from a common ancestor and are therefore related; (2) accompanied by feelings of humility and a corresponding critique of human moral superiority, often inspired or reinforced by a science-based cosmology that reveals how tiny human beings are in the universe; and (3) reinforced by metaphysics of interconnection and the idea of interdependence (mutual influence and reciprocal dependence) found in the sciences, especially in ecology and physics.
This chapter presupposes that clear understanding of dark green religion emerges best by examining four main types of it, while providing concrete examples of each. In this and in subsequent chapters I focus especially on examples drawn from what I call the environmentalist (or environmental) milieu, namely, contexts in which environmentally concerned officials, scientists, activists, and other citizens connect with and reciprocally influence one another. I have adapted “environmentalist milieu” from the British sociologist Colin Campbell’s notion of the “cultic milieu.” He used the phrase to describe sectors in Western societies in which socially deviant, countercultural knowledge—both spiritual and scientific/quasi-scientific—are brought together by their carriers and proponents, incubating, cross-fertilizing, reproducing, and spreading. Within the countercultural, cultic milieu, individuals and groups are remarkably receptive to each other’s ideas, and they generally understand themselves to be in resistance to the cultural mainstream.2 The result is an eclectic bricolage, by which I mean an amalgamation of bits and pieces of a wide array of ideas and practices, drawn from diverse cultural systems, religious traditions, and political ideologies. In a bricolage these various ideas and practices are fused together, like a bricklayer or mason piecing together a wall or building with mortar and stone. As this and the subsequent chapters demonstrate, there is a global environmentalist milieu in which shared ideas incubate, cross-fertilize, and spread. It is a process characterized by hybridization and bricolage.
Commonly, dark green religious and moral sentiments are embedded in worldviews and narratives that are believed to cohere with science—but they are also often grounded in mystical or intuitive knowledge that is beyond the reach of scientific method. To perceive how dark green religion emerges, diversifies, and spreads, it is important to understand the basic processes within this creative, increasingly global milieu. Such an understanding also helps to explain why, even when certain types and tendencies of dark green religion can be identified, the boundaries between them remain permeable, blurred, and perpetually shifting—much like the boundaries of religion itself.
Although they all have historical antecedents, I perceive four main types of dark green spirituality that have been flourishing since the first Earth Day in 1970 (see table 1).
The first two types are forms of Animism (see middle column, reading down), one supernaturalistic and the other naturalistic. The second two types I refer to as Gaian Earth Religion (right column, reading down), a shorthand way to suggest holistic and organicist worldviews. As with Animism, one form of Gaian Earth Religion is spiritual or supernaturalistic, which I call Gaian Spirituality (in the row labeled “Supernaturalism”); the other is naturalistic, which I have called Gaian Naturalism (in the row labeled “Naturalism”). The blurred lines between the four types indicate permeable boundaries; the types represent tendencies rather than uncomplicated, static, and rigid clusters of individuals and movements.
Animism is etymologically rooted in the Latin word anima, meaning life, breath, and soul. Today it commonly refers to perceptions that natural entities, forces, and nonhuman life-forms have one or more of the following: a soul or vital lifeforce or spirit, personhood (an affective life and personal intentions), and consciousness, often but not always including special spiritual intelligence or powers. Animistic perceptions are often accompanied by ethical mores specifying the sorts of relationships that human beings should have, or avoid having, with nature’s diverse forces and beings. Sometimes Animism involves communication and/or even communion with such intelligences or lifeforces, or beliefs that nature’s intelligences and forces are divine and should be worshipped and/or beseeched for healing or other favors. Animism generally enjoins respect if not reverence for and veneration of such intelligences and forces and promotes a felt kinship with them. Put simply, Animism has to do with the perception that spiritual intelligences or lifeforces animate natural objects or living things. With the term spiritual intelligences, I especially seek to capture the beliefs of those for whom there is some immaterial, supernaturalistic dimension to the Animistic perception. This is the form of dark green religion I have labeled Spiritual Animism. With the expression lifeforces, I focus especially on those who are agnostic or skeptical of any immaterial dimension underlying the life-forms or natural forces they wish to understand and with whom they may also seek to communicate. This is the form of dark green religion I have labeled Naturalistic Animism. In both cases, Animism, as I am configuring the term, involves a shared perception that beings or entities in nature have their own integrity, ways of being, personhood, and even intelligence. Animism postulates that people can, at least by conjecture and imagination, and sometimes through ritualized action and other practices, come to some understanding of these living forces and intelligences in nature and develop mutually respectful and beneficial relationships with them.3
Gaian Earth Religion, in my lexicon, stands firmly in the organicist tradition. It understands the biosphere (universe or cosmos) to be alive or conscious, or at least by metaphor and analogy to resemble organisms with their many interdependent parts. Moreover, this energetic, interdependent, living system is understood to be the fundamental thing to understand and venerate. Such a perspective takes the whole, usually but not always understood scientifically, as a model. Gaian Earth Religion thus defies the naturalistic fallacy argument in ethics (the assertion that one cannot logically derive a value from a fact) by suggesting that nature itself provides models and natural laws to follow. Furthermore, Gaian Earth Religion relies on metaphors of the sacred to express its sense of the precious quality of the whole. What I term Gaian Spirituality is avowedly supernaturalistic, perceiving the superorganism—whether the biosphere or the entire universe—to have consciousness, whether this is understood as an expression or part of God, Brahman, the Great Mystery, or whatever name one uses to symbolize a divine cosmos. Gaian Spirituality is more likely to draw on nonmainstream or nonconsensus science for data that reinforces its generally pantheistic (or panentheistic) and holistic metaphysics. It is more open to interpretations commonly found in subcultures typically labeled New Age. The form of dark green religion I call Gaian Naturalism, on the other hand, is skeptical of supernaturalistic metaphysics. It is more likely to restrict its claims to the scientific mainstream as a basis for understanding and promoting a holistic metaphysics. Yet its proponents express awe and wonder when facing the complexity and mysteries of life and the universe, relying on religious language and metaphors of the sacred (sometimes only implicitly and not self-consciously) when confessing their feelings of belonging and connection to the energy and life systems that they inhabit and study.
This typology is based on close observation of the diverse expressions of green and dark green religion both in the United States and abroad. Extended analysis of each of the four types will clarify my classifications and reveal that some actors and movements have affinity with more than one type of dark green religion.
Exemplars of Spiritual Animism and Gaian Spirituality include three green thinker/activists whose spiritual paths involved serious encounters with Buddhism: Gary Snyder, Joanna Macy, and John Seed. All three also identify with deep ecology.
An American Buddhist-Animist. Many from the 1960s generation will remember Gary Snyder as one of the “Beat poets” from the second wave of the San Francisco poetry renaissance during the 1950s and 1960s, and as the model for the character Japhy Ryder in Jack Kerouac’s famous Dharma Bums.4 What distinguished Snyder and fellow poets Michael McClure and Kenneth Rexroth from the rest of the beat movement was a deep sensitivity to nature and a perception of its sacredness and intrinsic value, making Snyder and kindred spirits excellent exemplars of dark green religion.
Gary Snyder gained widespread attention after winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1974 for Turtle Island, a book of poetry and prose in which he articulated many of the major themes of his life work.5 These included the possibility of animistic perception and the promotion of the green social philosophy known as bioregionalism, which seeks to decentralize political decision-making processes so that, as much as practical, they take place within the contours of specific ecological regions.
Extended time as a child in the Pacific Northwest’s great forests evoked in Snyder a profound reverence for wild nature and a concern about its destruction, themes that would become central in his life work. “From a very early age,” he wrote, “I found myself standing in an indefinable awe before the natural world. An attitude of gratitude, wonder, and a sense of protection especially as I began to see the hills being bulldozed down for roads, and the forests of the Pacific Northwest magically float away on logging trucks.”6 This wonder was related to what, for Snyder, has been an enduring, animistic perception. During a 1993 interview, he called himself a “Buddhist-Animist,” reflecting his long-standing identity as a “fairly orthodox Buddhist” as well as his belief that the world is full of spiritual intelligences: “I was born a natural animist. It wasn’t a moral or intellectual thing, from early childhood, I felt the presence of other beings, and I enjoyed being out in the woods right back of our farm . . . I think most kids are natural animists.”7
Given this animistic perception, Snyder was drawn to and studied anthropology related to American Indian cultures, but he discovered that they were largely inaccessible to non-Indians. As he put it with regard to Hopi culture, “Its content, perhaps, is universal, but you must be Hopi to follow the Hopi way.”8 So he elected to study Zen Buddhism in Japan, which he did for twelve years beginning in 1955. In Buddhism, Snyder found a metaphysics of interdependence and also kinship ethics with the nonhuman world that he thought had many affinities with American Indian spirituality and resonated with his own animistic perceptions.
After returning to the United States and being influenced by the subcultures of San Francisco, which he described later as rich “with anarchist and Wobblie connections and full of antiauthoritarian leftists,” he began integrating animistic nature religion into a new bioregional spirituality. He hoped this kind of hybrid of nature religion and place-based activism would reconnect humans to nature and nudge them toward more ecologically sustainable spiritualities and political arrangements. Snyder’s influence soon spread beyond Beat subcultures into the broader U.S. counterculture and environmentalist milieu. This was in part because he was offering something innovative, both in terms of spirituality and politics, to a culture that was alienated from nature and anxious for a political alternative to an impersonal and technocratic nation-state.
Snyder also proved adept at integrating ideas with tropes that would resonate with many Americans. When the term deep ecology was introduced in America, for example, Snyder embraced it as embodying spiritual and political beliefs and ideals he had long held.9 Yet he maintained a Buddhist identity and contended in discussions with deep ecology proponents that Zen Buddhism expressed deep ecological ethics with unsurpassed philosophical sophistication. In 1973 he called himself “a practicing Buddhist, or Buddhist-shamanist,” and twenty years later said he was a “fairly orthodox Buddhist” and “Buddhist-Animist.”10
Snyder’s enduring animist identity is as central as Buddhism to his religious identity. When I asked him in 1993 about interspecies communication, which he had periodically alluded to in his writings, he recalled an experience with a woman named Ella, an Irish mystic he knew during the 1950s, who once accompanied him on a walk in Northern California’s (John) Muir Redwoods. Hearing the song of a yellow crown warbler, Ella turned to him and reported that this song was a special gift to her from that bird. Reflecting on this and my follow-up question about what animist perception was like, Snyder answered:
It’s not that animals come up and say something in English in your ear. You know, it’s that things come into your mind. . . . Most people think that everything that comes into their mind is their own, their own mind, that it comes from within. . . . Well, some of those things that you think are from within are given to you from outside, and part of the trick is knowing which was which—being alert to the one that you know was a gift, and not think, “I thought that.” Say [instead], “Ah, that was a gift!” . . . I have a poem about magpie giving me a song [“Magpie’s Song”].
Snyder ended this reflection saying this was just one example. I have never found a more forthcoming statement by Snyder about his actual animistic experience. As with others, he has also made statements that cohere with more than one type of dark green religion, in his case, with Gaian Spirituality.
Since religion is defined as much by what is dismissed as by what is endorsed, recognizing Snyder’s criticisms of monotheistic religions further illustrates his worldview. Reflecting on the metaphysics of interconnection, for example, Snyder commented:
Interrelatedness is a common-sense observation. We should remind ourselves that ordinary working people, traditional people . . . notice that things are connected. What’s not common is the mind-body dualism that begins to come in with monotheism. And the alliance of monotheism with the formation of centralized governance and the national state, that’s what’s unnatural, and statistically in a minority on earth. The [most common] human experience has been an experience of Animism. Only a small proportion of people on earth have been monotheists. . . . Everybody else in the world is a multifaceted polytheist, animist, or Buddhist who sees things in the world [as alive].
In this dual critique of monotheism and nationalism, Snyder combined animistic spirituality with his anarchistic, bioregional politics—views prevalent but not all encompassing in the milieu of dark green religion. For Snyder, however, monotheism and authoritarian nationalism “do seem to go together.”
With Snyder’s animistic perceptions in mind, it is easy to understand why he liked Christopher Stone’s widely discussed argument that trees should be represented in democratic processes and the courts.11 About this argument Snyder commented that he had long resonated with the “animistic idea that you can hear voices from trees,” adding that this makes for an easy transition to the idea that all “nonhuman nature has rights.” Snyder came to understand that his own role as a poet was to promote such rights and to bring nonhuman voices “into the human realm.”12
For Snyder, these are sacred voices. Still, he has cautioned against regularly using the word sacred, fearing that overuse could devalue what it signifies. Yet his work unambiguously conveys his reverence for life. Indeed, a central theme in Snyder’s writings is the sacramental nature of life itself, and even the process of eating and being eaten: “Eating is a sacrament. The grace we say clears our hearts and guides the children and welcomes the guest, all at the same time. . . . To acknowledge that each of us at the table will eventually be part of the meal is not just being ‘realistic.’ It is allowing the sacred to enter and accepting the sacramental aspect of our shaky temporary personal being.”13
In both his spirituality and critical perspectives on Western societies and their destructiveness, Snyder has promoted ideas typical of dark green religion. Chief among these is the intrinsic value of nature: “Biological diversity, and the integrity of organic evolution on this planet, is where I take my stand.”14 But he has also been an important spokesperson for the view that the world’s dominant theistic religions are inferior to nature religions and place-based spiritualities. Like many involved with dark green religion, he expresses an ethics of kinship with all life, which produces a preference for vegetarianism and a penchant for political resistance to life-threatening forces. Snyder has thus contributed to the spread of bioregionalism, deep ecology, and even radical environmentalism. But his greatest legacy may be in his contributions to the revival of Animism in Western societies.
Views such as Snyder’s raise a fundamental epistemological question: if Animism is best kindled in childhood through ready access to nature, as it was for Snyder, then how in an increasingly urbanized world can this life-saving perception be encouraged?
Snyder’s prescription is bioregional “reinhabitation”—carefully learning the local lore, plants, and animals that are found in particular places. When one does this mindfully, he believes, appropriate lifeways that respect the place can be (re)discovered. By going “back to the land,” people can rediscover their affective connections to nature. Another way to facilitate such felt connections, Snyder says, is through “poetry and song.”15 These can be increasingly integrated into rituals that promote reverence for specific places and their inhabitants. Snyder and the others in his intentional community, located in the foothills of California’s Sierra Nevada, have worked on this for a generation. Their ritualizing draws on many traditions, including Buddhism, contemporary Paganism, and American Indian cultures. Snyder thinks that after many years experimenting with nature-related ritual they are “just beginning to get it right.”
Ritual Innovators. Joanna Macy, an American scholar and practitioner of Buddhism, and John Seed, an Australian Buddhist who founded the Rainforest Information Centre, have been on a kindred religious path. Unlike Snyder, who is not known for disseminating the ritual forms he and his community have been developing, Macy and Seed have labored to spread globally their ritual processes, believing that they reconnect people to the earth and its diverse inhabitants.
Their best-known ritual process is the Council of All Beings, which has inspired further experimentation with nature-focused ritual. The “sacred intention” of such rituals has been to reawaken understandings of spiritual realities that people today rarely perceive but that they believe animate nature in its many expressions. There are a variety of rituals that constitute the Council of All Beings, many of which are said to derive from indigenous cultures, because “rituals affirming the interconnectedness of the human and nonhuman worlds exist in every primitive culture.”16 But the heart of this often multiday council process is newly invented. It involves participants being instructed to go out into nature until they feel or perceive they are being chosen by some natural entity to speak for it in the upcoming gathering. This time period is sometimes likened to the vision quest practiced by some American Indian societies. Afterward, participants make costumes to facilitate their transformation and prepare for the rite. Then they assemble in their posthuman personas, having allowed themselves to be imaginatively or spiritually possessed by the consciousness of nonhuman entities—animals, plants, fish, rocks, soils, and rivers, for example.
The assembled council then discusses the current state of the world, verbalizing the anger, confusion, and pain that they feel as a result of being so poorly treated by human beings, and their profound grief over the rapid decline of the natural world they love. After this, some representative humans are brought into the circle to face their accusers. Eventually, the generous non–human beings offer support, and sometimes their special powers, to the humans in their midst. This is to help these compassionate humans to more effectively defend and heal the Earth. The ritual ends in various ways, sometimes in ecstatic dance celebrating interspecies and interplanetary oneness.
As is usually the case with any ritual, the experiences people have during the council varies. Some participants report being possessed by and speaking for the spirits of nonhuman entities. For such participants, the experience seems to fit what I am calling Spiritual Animism—and it seems to resemble the experiences of some indigenous shamans who move between human and nonhuman identities and worlds, and also what some New Age spiritual leaders describe as channeling the spirits of other beings. Other participants in the council may speak for DNA or energy pulses permeating the universe, or of the pain felt by Gaia from mining or the pollution of her waters. One of the central intentions of the council rituals, according to its creators, is to help people to “hear within themselves the sounds of the earth crying.”17 For such participants, both those possessed and those who hear the plaintive cries of a sentient, sacred earth, the experience fits what I am calling Gaian Spirituality. For others, speaking for nonhuman life-forms is considered more an act of moral imagination than of being called or possessed by spiritual intelligences or a sentient earth. For such activists, the council is a kind of ritualized performance art in which participants act out what they surmise it must feel like to be a nonhuman entity. Such participants understand that they are engaged in a creative act rather than making a mystical connection with spirits in nature. This latter type of understanding can be understood as a form of Naturalistic Animism or Gaian Naturalism.
Naturalistic Animism involves either skepticism or disbelief that some spiritual world runs parallel to the earth and animates nonhuman natural entities or earth herself. But those engaged in it nevertheless express, at minimum, kinship with and ethical concern for nonhuman life. Moreover, for many naturalistic animists, understanding and even communion with nonhuman lifeforms is possible. According to the historian Donald Worster, this kind of felt kinship, and the biocentric ethics that tends to accompany it, can be grounded in evolutionary theory. Worster cited Charles Darwin himself to illustrate: “If we choose to let conjecture run wild, then animals, our fellow brethren in pain, diseases, death, suffering and famine—our slaves in the most laborious works, our companions in our amusements—they may partake [of] our origin in one common ancestor—we may be all netted together.”18
Darwin clearly believed that a kinship ethic can be deduced from knowledge of our common ancestor and awareness that other animals suffer and face challenges, as do we. This kind of conjecture represents an empathetic form of analogical reasoning as well as an act of moral imagination—this is typical of those engaged in Naturalistic Animism. Animism understood in this way can be entirely independent of metaphysical speculation or supernaturalistic assumptions.
In the last paragraph of On the Origin of Species, Darwin also spoke about the evolutionary process in a way that I think expresses the form of dark green religion I am calling Gaian Naturalism:
It is interesting to contemplate . . . that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. . . . There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.19
Even though Darwin lost faith in a superordinate divine, creative force, here he spoke in an evocative way that could be read, in concert with his kinship-promoting passages, as expressing a reverence for life. We shall never know for sure whether Darwin would acknowledge such reverence were he alive today.20 But many scientists and other readers have subsequently understood these passages in precisely this way, in the way I am calling Gaian Naturalism. Moreover, through interviews with environmentalists and scientists, and analysis of widely scattered environmental writing, I have found many similar examples.
Kinship feelings are certainly common among those who endorse evolutionary theory’s supposition of common ancestors, including among ethologists, who study animal behavior, and cognitive ethologists in particular, who are especially interested in animal consciousness, communication, and emotions. Such Naturalistic Animism is easy to find among those who study primates, elephants, and other animals (especially mammals). (For simplicity I use the word animals to refer only to nonhuman ones, even though humans are also animals.) Katy Payne, an acoustic biologist, for example, has scrutinized elephant communication and concluded that attentive humans can communicate with elephants.21 Increasing numbers of scientists are arriving at similar conclusions, finding communicative and affective similarities between humans and other animals.22 A sense of delight, wonder, appreciation, and reverence for Gaia, often combined with terminology that speaks of the earth as sacred, has been often expressed by scientists and others who are skeptical if not dismissive of beliefs in a divine creator or other nonmaterial divine beings. An Ethologist and Primatologist. The American biologist-ethologist Marc Bekoff is a well-known contemporary proponent of Naturalistic Animism. He argues that cognitive ethology and everyday observation of animals prove they have rich affective lives and can communicate with humans in many ways, including by expressing their desires, pleasures, aversions, pain, and grief. He also believes they have traits that resemble morality, if not also spiritual experiences or precursors to them. Bekoff draws on both anecdotal reports from scientists as well as methodologically rigorous research in making such assertions.23 While acknowledging that interpretation can be difficult, Bekoff claims that the pathway to communication with animals is through their eyes. Here, his animistic perception becomes clear: “Eyes are magnificently complex organs that provide a window into an individual’s emotional world. As in humans, in many species eyes reflect feelings, whether wide open in glee or sunken in despair. Eyes are mysterious, evocative, and immediate communicators. . . . Personal interpretation or intuition plays a role, and yet there is no more direct animal-to-animal communication than staring deeply into another’s eyes.”24
Bekoff traced his ability to understand the meaning in animal eyes to an occasion when he had to kill a cat as part of a doctoral research project. When he went to pick up the animal, whom he considered intelligent, he faced a piercing, unbreaking stare, which he took to communicate, “Why me?” These eyes brought Bekoff to tears, for they “told the whole story of the interminable pain and indignity [the cat] had endured”; afterward, Bekoff “resolved not to conduct research that involved intentionally inflicting pain or causing the death of another being.” Bekoff buttressed his own anecdotes of communicative experiences with animals by drawing on similar reports by other scientists, which often also had to do with eye contact.25
I musingly think of such experiences as eye-to-eye epiphanies—and have found many examples of them in animistic, dark green spirituality, including in the life and work of the famed primatologist Jane Goodall.
One of Goodall’s most profound experiences of interspecies communication began with eye-to-eye communication with a dominant male chimpanzee she named David Greybeard. She felt as though he had invited her to follow him, one day, waiting for her to catch up. Recalling the event some four decades later, she wrote that when she “looked into his large and lustrous eyes, set so wide apart; they seemed somehow to express his entire personality. David taught me that so long as I looked into his eyes without arrogance, without any request, he did not mind. And sometimes he gazed back at me as he did that afternoon. His eyes seemed almost like windows through which, if only I had the skill, I could look into his mind.”26 This eye-to-eye connection led to other forms of nonverbal communication, such as when they communicated trust through touch, “a language far more ancient than words, a language we shared with our prehistoric ancestor, a language bridging our two worlds. And I was deeply moved.” Goodall believes, based on such experiences, that communication and communion can be enhanced through nonverbal communication: “It is all but impossible to describe the new awareness that comes when words are abandoned. . . . Words are a part of our rational selves, and to abandon them for a while is to give freer reign to our intuitive selves.”
It is not surprising that Goodall and Bekoff became close friends and collaborators, given the similarity of some of their experiences with animals. They both like and commonly discuss, for example, the story of a chimpanzee named JoJo, which has the potential of becoming a new, sacred story of human/animal connection. In a section titled “The Power of Eyes” in The Ten Trusts, a book they coauthored, Goodall explained that JoJo was unfamiliar with chimpanzee ways because he had been orphaned young and grew up in a cage. Eventually he was transferred to a zoo, where he was threatened by more aggressive chimpanzees, from whom he fled in terror, falling into the surrounding water-filled moat and beginning to drown. Within moments, a man risked his own life, ignoring the threatening chimpanzees and the terrified protests of his own family, and jumped into the enclosure and made repeated, eventually successful efforts to save JoJo.
According to Goodall, when asked what made him do it, the visitor answered, “I happened to look into his eyes, and it was like looking into the eyes of a man. And the message was, ‘Won’t anybody help me?’ ” Goodall commented: “I have seen that appeal for help in the eyes of so many suffering creatures. . . . All around us, all around the world, suffering individuals look toward us with a plea in their eyes, asking us for help. And if we dare to look into those eyes, then we shall feel their suffering . . . [and reach] out to help the suffering animals in their vanishing homelands. . . . Together we can bring change to the world, gradually replacing fear and hatred with compassion and love. Love for all living beings.”27 Bekoff, who provided his own examples of eye-focused communication, and who acknowledges that reading emotions in eyes requires intuition and personal interpretation, nevertheless insists that “even when we can’t measure their meaning, it is the eyes that most evocatively convey sentience.”28
In their individually authored books and lectures, Bekoff and Goodall repeatedly urge people to learn from animals by humbly opening their minds and hearts to them. If people would only learn to enter imaginatively into the worlds of other creatures, “billions of human and animal beings would be spared untold misery and suffering.”29 In this idea of animal teachers, there is at work a kind of empathetic and animistic moral imagination.
An Animist Missionary. By early in the twenty-first century, through hundreds of lectures each year around the world and empowered by her designation as a United Nations Ambassador for Peace in 2002, Goodall had become the world’s foremost Animist missionary. The genesis of her spirituality appears to be largely naturalistic, through direct observation and experience, although her views are more anecdotal than some scientists find credible. She certainly agrees with Bekoff that ethology and especially “our understanding of chimpanzee behavior . . . has blurred the line, once seen so sharp, between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom.” From this follows, “a new sense of responsibility.”30 But this new perspective does even more. The kind of communicative encounter Goodall had with David Greybeard provided not only a feeling of connection with another being but it convinced her that she belonged to a something greater, a sacred, interdependent universe: “Together the chimpanzees and the baboons and monkeys, the birds and insects, the teeming life of the vibrant forest . . . the uncountable stars and planets of the solar system formed one whole. All one, all part of the great mystery. And I was part of it too.”31
I once made a presentation to a student conference held by Goodall’s Roots and Shoots program, during which she graciously agreed to an interview. Included in the conversation were Mary Lewis, Goodall’s assistant, and Dana Lyons, an environmental balladeer who was performing at the conference and had collaborated with Goodall in projects involving music and storytelling. During the interview I followed up on a number of themes Goodall regularly explores in her books and presentations. Having noticed the kind of statement quoted above about being part of the Great Mystery, I asked her if she had been inspired by Thomas Berry (1914–2009), a Catholic priest who urged that we consider the scientific story of the universe, and of biotic evolution, as a sacred story. Berry became one of the most influential proponents of dark green religion and in his own right is an excellent exemplar of Gaian Spirituality. Goodall expressed affinity for his thought, but added, “I can’t say I was influenced because I came to him afterwards, but I love what he writes.”32
Goodall’s spirituality is eclectic and thus is difficult to pigeonhole. She indicated in her spiritual autobiography that she had many enchanted moments in nature as a child, which cultivated the “sense of wonder, of awe, that can lead to spiritual awareness.” She added that her grandmother wished “to make sure our beliefs weren’t limited to the animistic worship of nature and animals,” however, and encouraged her to also believe in God.33 Goodall has retained her theism, but her views seem far from her grandmother’s orthodox Christian theism. This can be seen at many points, including where Goodall expresses affinity with beliefs that can be characterized as panentheistic, pagan, and animistic, as well as beliefs about out-of-body experiences and reincarnation.34
Her pantheistic and animistic feelings can be seen in her writings about becoming “totally absorbed into this forest existence” during her years in Gombe.35 Her assessment that there is no substitute for direct, personal experience with nature resonates with dark green religion:
I was getting closer to animals and nature, and as a result, closer to myself and more and more in tune with the spiritual power that I felt all around. For those who have experienced the joy of being alone with nature there is really little need for me to say much more; for those who have not, no words of mine can ever describe the powerful, almost mystical knowledge of beauty and eternity that come, suddenly, and all unexpected . . .
The longer I spent on my own, the more I became one with the magic forest that was now my home. Inanimate objects developed their own identities and, like my favorite saint, Francis of Assisi, I named them and greeted them as friends. . . . In particular I became intensely aware of the being-ness of trees.
When reading this I was taken by how spiritual power, which animates all things, is immanent and intimately felt. I was particularly interested in her statement about the personhood of trees, for I knew from Lyons that their collaboration began because Goodall was moved by “The Tree,” a song Lyons wrote and later published as a children’s book.36 Lyons wrote the song at the end of a multiday campout under an ancient Douglas fir. As the song came to him, he had the feeling that the tree was giving him the song, that it was that tree’s song. Given his scientific bent, Lyons recalled later that he initially “only light-heartedly believed it.”37 He later became convinced when Native American elders who heard the song told him that, indeed, it was the tree’s song. Translated from Tree-speak into first-person English, the song is about the tree’s fear as loggers draw near as well as its anguish about the destruction of the tree’s beloved forest and forest friends.
I asked Goodall why she resonated with Lyons’s song and spoke of the personhood of trees. As a child, she answered, she always had a deep connection with trees, climbing up a special one in her garden, “near the sky and the birds and the wind.” She then described visiting central Africa’s Goualougo Triangle during a trip sponsored by the National Geographic Society. It “was the first time I had been in a forest that had never been lived in nor logged,” she noted. “That was a spiritual experience.”
After she related another story of being in a templelike forest, I asked her, “Have you had experiences like Dana . . . [when] you feel almost the energy of the individual trees that seem to be wanting to communicate?” She answered emphatically, “But I felt that all the time. That’s why I was always putting my hand on the tree and feeling the sap like blood coming up.” This was why she loved Fangorn (the tree-being or ent, whose informal name was Treebeard) in J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings novels. She likened the ents to some of the great Greek myths in which nature is full of spiritual personalities. I have heard such affinity for Fangorn and the ents expressed on numerous occasions within the environmentalist milieu and especially among those involved in dark green religion.
In conversations like these, Goodall and others express themes common in dark green religion, including that nature is sacred and full of intelligences that can be experienced through the senses but that are often only dimly perceived by those in modern societies. During our interview, for example, she spoke at length about a “brilliant” hand-raised Congo African gray parrot named N’kisi, who lives in New York City with an artist, knows nearly one thousand words, and uses them appropriately in fully grammatical sentences. According to Goodall, N’kisi even initiates conversations; and those who have studied the bird have documented her uncanny telepathic ability, which, Goodall said, one peer-reviewed article concluded had been proven scientifically.38
During another part of our conversation, Goodall favorably mentioned Alexandra Morton’s book, Listening to Whales, commenting that this woman was “passionate about whales” but “decided she had to go the scientific route and the whole book, although it’s not meant to be, is a fight between what she knows about the whales and her determination to stay in the scientific method. At the end she breaks out. She can’t help it.” By breaking out, Goodall meant breaking past the scientific taboo about anthropomorphizing, but more importantly, beyond reductionist science that ignores the spiritual dimensions of life. Goodall respects science and her fame is grounded on her scientific advances. But for Goodall, not everything can be perceived through scientific lenses. She thinks, for example, that quantum mechanics supports “the idea that there is intelligence behind the universe. So that particular branch of science, which seems so very unspiritual to start with, ends up coming right back around” to spirituality.
In another example of her nature spirituality, after the death of her husband, Goodall sought “healing and strength in the ancient forest” and “the serenity that had come from living, day after day, as part of the natural world.”39 A few years later she was deep in the forest with the chimpanzees when the weather changed rapidly, leading to one of her most profound experiences, which she considered truly mystical: “Lost in awe at the beauty around me, I must have slipped into a state of heightened awareness [when] . . . that self was utterly absent: I and the chimpanzees, the earth and trees and air, seemed to merge, to become one with the spirit power of life itself. The air was filled with a feathered symphony, the evensong of birds.”40 Lingering long afterward, she understood the place where it occurred as sacred.
Most Western scientists do not speak in this way. It is equally unorthodox in Western religion to speak of the “spirit power of life” or to consider natural places to be sacred. But for Goodall, these perceptions and experiences were not to be feared or rejected, for if we recognize that intact natural places are sacred places and “reestablish our connection with the natural world and with the Spiritual Power that is around us . . . then we can move . . . into the final stage of human evolution, spiritual evolution.”41 This is one of Goodall’s central themes and the ground of her hope for the world.
An important aspect of this needed spiritual evolution is that all people should gain a perception that Goodall believes is common among indigenous people: that animals have spirits that should be respected. Her criticism of Western reductionism is perhaps most clear when she indicates her belief that animals have souls: “Many theologians and philosophers argue that only humans have ‘souls.’ My years in the forest with the chimpanzees have led me to question this assumption.”42 She has also speculated on what seem to be waterfall dances among chimpanzees, suggesting that they reflect the kind of ecstatic experiences in nature that may resemble or be a precursor to a kind of animistic, pagan religion.43
Goodall thus believes there is more sentience and intelligence in nature than most modern people perceive. Indeed, individual creatures, and even groups of them, can have important things to tell us, if we would only listen. One story she now commonly tells enthusiastic audiences exemplifies this perception: On the day bombs began falling in Baghdad, in March 2002, as Britain and the United States began their war to topple the Iraqi regime, Goodall was staying with a friend on the Platte River in Nebraska. There, the largest migration of sandhill cranes in decades was underway. During our conversation, she described watching the cranes dance for nearly two hours:
If you think of them [cranes] as a symbol of peace, at first it was just wonderful, but then I began to think, you know, are they telling me something? Because animals do come and tell you something if you listen to them. And then the message that evening that, you know, in spite of all that we’ve done, that there was still enough food here to sustain twelve million birds to get enough body fat to fly off to Siberia and Alaska without stopping to feed again. You know, so this was a call to action. We must preserve what’s left. . . . We’ve got to work doubly hard to keep the planet safe so that when peace comes we are ready for it. That was the main message of the cranes that day.
Lyons then asked if the message was “from the animal kingdom,” and Goodall assented, “It came from the animal kingdom.” This kind of perception, that animals come as oracles, providing wisdom, hope, or presaging an important event, is one I have periodically encountered among those engaged in dark green religion.
Goodall’s own religious bricolage resembles many others in modern, multicultural contexts. It is also an example of the ways in which individuals within the environmentalist milieu piece together their spirituality from diverse encounters and readings. Goodall’s spirituality also illustrates how the lines can be blurred among the four types of dark green religion. Early caregivers encouraged her childhood receptivity to animals and penchant for understanding them as valuable, sentient creatures, which enabled her to perceive things about chimpanzees that others could not. The genesis of her worldview seems to lie primarily in her own naturalistic, animistic experiences. But to her ethology-grounded understanding of the emotional lives of animals, she added a belief that animals have souls and can communicate with human beings. Moreover, she has an affinity for Gaian Spirituality, with her oceanic experiences of oneness with the universe during intimate times in nature, which led her to consider the universe and earth in general, and especially the wild places where special revelations occur, as sacred places.
Goodall, like many involved in dark green religion, is thus developing a hybridized spirituality that draws on both science and personal spiritual experience that includes animistic perceptions, holistic metaphysics, and a belief that there is some superordinate intelligence animating the universe.
An Interpreter of Wolves and Mountains. Many consider the American Aldo Leopold (1887–1948) to be the greatest ecologist and environmental ethicist of the twentieth century. Also one of the country’s first foresters, Leopold expressed at an affective level something that may be unavailable from science alone, namely, a deep emotional connection to and reverence for the earth. Leopold is best known today for his “land ethic,” which many consider to be the foremost expression of an ecocentric ethic. The most famous passages in this ethic follow:
All ethics so far evolved rest upon a single premise: that the individual is a member of a community of interdependent parts. . . .
The land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.
In short, a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members and also respect for the community as such.
It is inconceivable to me that an ethical relation to land can exist without love, respect, and admiration for land, and a high regard for its value. By value, I of course mean something far broader than mere economic value; I mean value in the philosophical sense.
A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.
I have purposely presented the land ethic as a product of social evolution because nothing so important as an ethic is ever “written.” . . .
The evolution of a land ethic is an intellectual as well as emotional process.44
For Leopold, the perceptual shift needed for the land ethic must be grounded both in science and our deepest emotions. But he felt that people had become so separated from and ignorant of the land community that they no longer had a “vital relation to it.” Developing any ethic depends on changing our “loyalties, affections, and convictions,” but it was difficult to promote a land ethic because “philosophy and religion have not yet heard of it.” Making the point three decades before Lynn White, Leopold forthrightly asserted that Western religion was to blame: “Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.”45
Leopold clearly sought to awaken a reverence for life. One way he did this was to draw on Darwinian cosmogony, an evolutionary understanding of how the world came to be the way it is. With reasoning similar to Darwin’s, Leopold thought this would evoke kinship feelings, a sense of ethical responsibility toward all life, and a corresponding wonder toward nature: “It is a century now since Darwin gave us the first glimpse of the origin of species. We know now what was unknown to all the preceding caravan of generations: that men are only fellow-voyagers with other creatures in the odyssey of evolution. This new knowledge should have given us . . . a sense of kinship with fellow-creatures; a wish to live and let live; a sense of wonder over . . . the biotic enterprise.”46 In Leopold’s perceptions we see the main elements of dark green religion: a critique of Abrahamic religion and a feeling that all species have a right to be here, a sense of belonging and connection to nature, and a consecration of the evolutionary story. This passage echoes Darwin’s expression of evolutionary kinship and wonder at the grandeur of the evolutionary process.
Indeed, for Leopold, the evolutionary story is not only a scientific narrative, it is an odyssey—an epic, heroic journey—and for many, this assumes a sacred, mythic character. In 1978 E. O. Wilson first used the phrase “Epic of Evolution,” calling it “the best myth we will ever have” to capture the feelings of awe, wonder, and grandeur that scientific observers of nature often feel.47 Wilson’s phrase sounds very much like the “odyssey of evolution” that Leopold wrote about in the 1940s. By the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, new forms of religious creativity emerged that promoted the Epic of Evolution and the so-called Universe Story as new sacred narratives for humankind. But Leopold told another story in A Sand County Almanac, in an essay titled “Thinking Like a Mountain,” which over the past several decades has been exceptionally influential within the environmentalist milieu.
It is a story steeped in irony because, as a young man and one of the first foresters in America, with pen and gun, Leopold participated in a nearly successful campaign to eradicate wolves from North America.48 But he had a change of heart precipitated in part by an experience (probably in 1909) when he and his Forest Service comrades shot a mother wolf they spotted when surveying timber in New Mexico. Three and a half decades later, in 1944, Leopold wrote what are now among the most famous lines in American environmental literature:
We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.49
Although one can surmise what might be a wolf’s point of view regarding death by gunfire, more is needed to understand what Leopold meant by the mountain’s point of view. It is valuable to know, for example, that while serving on a Wisconsin wildlife commission Leopold had been harshly criticized by both hunters and deer lovers for his belief that the health of the land depends on the presence of wolves.50 One can imagine that this controversy was well in his mind when he wrote poignantly about the many meanings people and other living things invest in the wolf’s infamous howl, adding mysteriously that underneath lies a deeper meaning known only to the mountain itself. After this passage, Leopold discussed how devastating game animals like deer can be when not checked by predators, concluding, “I now suspect that just as a deer lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer.”51
Leopold was writing metaphorically, of course, when he argued that the land knows that its well-being depends on the flourishing of all native lifeforms, using this as a pedagogical tool to suggest that an ecologically informed people can learn this too. But Leopold’s epiphany involved more than grasping the value of the predators he had once persecuted; it reflected his deepening ethical holism and his long-term reverence for wildlands. Indeed, Leopold concluded this now famous essay drawing on Henry David Thoreau, who was probably the most important architect and inspiration for dark green religion. Writing during the depths of World War II and reflecting the hope for peace, Leopold noted that for many creatures “too much safety seems to yield only danger in the long run. Perhaps this is behind Thoreau’s dictum: In wildness is the salvation of the world. Perhaps this is the hidden meaning in the howl of the wolf, long known among mountains, but seldom perceived among men.”52
This “green fire” story has become one of the most beloved narratives for environmentalists. Wallace Stegner, a famous American writer and environmentalist, made this explicit when he called Sand County Almanac a “holy book.”53 He was not alone in this feeling: on many occasions within the environmental milieu I have heard Leopold’s writings called “sacred texts,” not incidentally in the same way some speak also of the writings of Thoreau, John Muir, and sometimes Edward Abbey. Leopold’s green fire story expresses the “live and let live” philosophy he developed over a lifetime closely observing and loving nature.
Yet his holism was not hatched through ecological observation alone. It was nurtured by the metaphysics of Peter Ouspensky, a Russian philosopher who had articulated an organicist notion of a living earth and whom Leopold had avidly read. As Leopold’s biographer Curt Meine put it, Ouspensky’s philosophy “dovetailed well with Leopold’s field-based appreciation of the complex interrelations of the landscape of the American Southwest.”54 Leopold’s blending of intuition and science is clear in some of his most often-quoted statements:
The land is one organism. Its parts, like our own parts, compete with each other and co-operate with each other. The competitions are as much a part of the inner workings as the co-operations. You can regulate them—cautiously—but not abolish them.
The outstanding scientific discovery of the twentieth century is . . . the complexity of the land organism. . . . If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of aeons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.55
Possibly, in our intuitive perceptions, which may be truer than our science and less impeded by words than our philosophies, we realize the indivisibility of the earth—its soil, mountains, rivers, forests, climate, plants, and animals, and respect it collectively not only as a useful servant but as a living being, vastly less alive than ourselves in degree, but vastly greater than ourselves in time and space—a being that was old when the morning stars sang together, and when the last of us has been gathered unto his fathers, will still be young.56
Meine also noted both Leopold’s lifelong reticence to speak about his spirituality and how he was much more forthcoming in his final published book about his affective connections to nature and the ethics that flowed from them. Meine recorded that late in Leopold’s life he was pressed by his youngest daughter about his religious beliefs. She told Meine, “he believed there was a mystical supreme power that guided the universe but to him this power was not a personalized God. It was more akin to the laws of nature. He thought organized religion was all right for many people, but he did not partake of it himself, having left that behind him a long time ago. His religion came from nature, he said.”57 Leopold’s son corroborated this view: “I think he, like many of the rest of us, was kind of pantheistic. The organization of the universe was enough to take the place of God, if you like. He certainly didn’t believe in a personal God, as far as I can tell. The wonders of nature were, of course, objects of admiration and satisfaction to him.”58
Considering Leopold’s regard for animals and the possibility he expressed of communicating with them, of sensing something meaningful in a wolf’s eyes, it seems possible that Leopold manifested perceptions like those I am calling Naturalistic Animism. At the same time, with regard to his holistic view of ecological systems and of the universe as a whole, Leopold’s perceptions seem to reflect Gaian Naturalism. So does his metaphorical suggestion that the mountain has its own point of view. His holism was deeply grounded in a naturalistic understanding of the processes by which the universe and biotic evolution unfolded. Like others involved in dark green religion, Leopold also had an activist side; in 1935 he was one of seven prominent cofounders of the Wilderness Society, an organization whose mission is itself an expression of the idea that nature has intrinsic value.
A Devotee of Gaia. The independent British environmental scientist, James Lovelock, can be credited with resurrecting Gaia, the Greek goddess of the earth.59 He did this by adopting her as the namesake for his now famous Gaia theory, which asserts that the biosphere functions as a self-regulating organism, maintaining the conditions necessary for all the lifeforms it contains. As he put it in 2006, “I have for the past forty years looked on the Earth through Gaia theory as if, metaphorically, it were alive at least in the sense that it regulates climate and composition of the Earth’s surface so as always to be fit for whatever forms of life inhabit it. . . . I am continuing to use the metaphor of ‘the living Earth’ for Gaia; but do not assume that I am thinking of the Earth as alive in a sentient way.”60
Because many who encountered the theory took it in an overtly religious direction (some concluded that Gaia theory vindicated pantheistic or panentheistic beliefs), Lovelock emphasized that for him Gaia is a metaphor, not a sentient god. Lest anyone misconstrue him, Lovelock declared, “I am a scientist and think in terms of probabilities not certainties and so I am an agnostic.” Such statements indicate that Lovelock unambiguously represents what I am calling Gaian Naturalism, for he wishes to ensure that everyone understands that his epistemology and worldview is scientific.
While concerned that religious interest in his theory might hinder understanding and further exploration of his hypothesis, Lovelock nevertheless grew to appreciate the impulse to consider the Gaian system in religious terms. In this he agreed with his friend and mentor Crispin Tickell, who wrote in the foreword to Lovelock’s Revenge of Gaia, “If we are eventually to achieve a human society in harmony with nature, we must be guided by more respect for it. No wonder that some have wanted to make a religion of Gaia, or of life as such. This book is a marvelous introduction to the science of how our species should make its peace with the rest of the world in which we live.”61
While Lovelock may not consider himself conventionally religious, he has nevertheless expressed many convictions that cohere with beliefs typically found among dark green religionists and that signal that he would welcome a new, science-based nature religion. Proponents of dark green religion, for example, are typically critical of Abrahamic religions, which are accused of being arrogant and anthropocentric. Lovelock agrees: “Our religions have not yet given us the rules and guidance for our relationship with Gaia. The humanist concept of sustainable development and the Christian concept of stewardship are flawed by unconscious hubris. We have neither the knowledge nor the capacity to achieve them. We are no more qualified to be the stewards or developers of the Earth than are goats to be gardeners.”62
Lovelock’s prescription is that “those with faith should look again at our Earthly home and see it as a holy place, part of God’s creation, but something that we have desecrated.” He recognizes that some “church leaders are moving towards a theology of creation that could include Gaia” and are “troubled by its desecration”; and he lauded Anne Primavesi for her book Gaia’s Gift, which “shows the way to consilience between faith and Gaia.” But while he encourages people of faith to integrate a reverence for Gaia into their theology and concern for all life into their ethics, he does not think one needs a theistic grounding for such reverence and ethics. Far more important is a recognition that we belong to and are dependent upon Gaia, for “the well being of Gaia must always come before that of ourselves: we cannot exist without Gaia [and if we do not come to realize this] we will, by thinking selfishly only of the welfare of humans and ignoring Gaia, have caused our own near extinction.” For Lovelock it is a sense of belonging and connection with the earth that is the most critical recognition of all: “Most of all we should remember that we are a part of Gaia, and she is indeed our home.”63
Lovelock often sounds like those proponents of deep ecology who—beginning with Arne Naess—argue that a hubristic anthropocentrism is the key driver of environmental decline. Like them, Lovelock believes that most environmentalists share the culture’s deeply seated and environmentally destructive anthropocentrism: “Environmentalism has rarely been concerned with this natural proletariat, the underworld of nature; mostly it has been a radical political activity, and, not surprisingly, Rachel Carson’s message was soon translated, at the dinner tables of the affluent suburbs and universities, from a threat to birds into a threat to people.”64 The current crisis is related to and compounded by, Lovelock thinks, the disconnection from and lack of love for nature typical of urbanized humankind:
Over half the Earth’s people live in cities, and they hardly ever see, feel or hear the natural world. Therefore our first duty if we are green should be to convince them that the real world is the living Earth and that they and their city lives are a part of it and wholly dependent on it for their existence. Our role is to teach and to set an example by our lives. . . .
We need most of all to renew that love and empathy for nature that we lost when we began our love affair with city life.65
It is not surprising that Lovelock would express affinity with deep ecology since these ideas cohere well with the philosophy. Indeed, Lovelock praised deep ecology proponents Arne Naess and The Ecologist founder Edward Goldsmith for their efforts to reconnect citified people to nature.66
If reconnecting people to nature is critical, then the question of means naturally arises. Lovelock notes that what people believe is quite malleable, and therefore we could “make Gaia an instinctive belief by exposing our children to the natural world, telling them how and why it is Gaia in action, and showing that they belong to it.” He also suggests that scientists should not be too quick to reject religious metaphors in this educational quest. “There is a deep need in all of us for trust in something larger than ourselves,” Lovelock avers, offering this personal testimony: “I put my trust in Gaia.” Indeed, Lovelock thinks religious metaphor may be unavoidable: “We have to use the crude tool of metaphor to translate conscious ideas into unconscious understanding. Just as the metaphor, a living Earth, used to explain Gaia, was wrongly rejected by reductionist scientists, so it may be wrong of them also to reject the metaphors and fables of the sacred texts. Crude they may be, but they serve to ignite an intuitive understanding of God and creation that cannot be falsified by rational argument.”67
Yet it seems clear that what Lovelock would most like to see is not an ecologized theism but a Gaian religion of nature. A good example can be found in his 2001 comments about a speech given by then-president Vaclav Havel of the Czech Republic: “When he was awarded the Freedom Medal of the United States . . . [Havel] took as the title for his acceptance speech, ‘We are not here for ourselves alone.’ He reminded us that science had replaced religion as the authoritative source of knowledge about life and the cosmos but that modern reductionist science offers no moral guidance. He went on to say that recent holistic science did offer something to fill this moral void. He offered Gaia as something to which we could be accountable.” Lovelock concluded, “If we could revere our planet with the same respect and love that we gave in the past to God, it would benefit us as well as the Earth.” And although a faith-based approach is not Lovelock’s preference, he added, “Perhaps those who have faith might see this as God’s will also.”68
For Lovelock, then, a proper understanding of the human place in the Gaian system is akin to Leopold’s exhortation that people understand themselves as “plain members and citizens” of the biotic community—a phrase that resembles Lovelock’s idea of belonging to and depending on Gaia.69 Moreover, when people understand their proper place, Lovelock believes, they will revere rather than consider themselves superior to other life-forms and will strive to create a world where all can flourish.
All of this fits quite well with my model of dark green religion, and it also raises the specter of a shadow side of such nature spirituality. On the one hand, Lovelock’s notions might worry those who view deviation from their preferred theism as an aberration from eternal religious truths and their corresponding ethics. On the other hand, the kind of ethical holism advocated by Lovelock might lead to violations of individual rights. It is not difficult to identify passages in Lovelock’s writings that those who prioritize individual rights and liberties would find troubling. For example: “We are part of the Gaian family, and valued as such, but until we stop acting as if human welfare was all that mattered . . . all talk of further development of any kind is unacceptable.”70 Some would criticize this statement, and Lovelock’s expressed aversion to both Christian stewardship and the humanistic idea of sustainable development, as evidence of indifference to human needs.
Equally likely to engender criticism are the following passages in which Lovelock argues for a dramatic reduction in human numbers and that the freedoms typically expected in democratic societies may need to be curtailed in order to heal the Gaian system:
The root of our problems with the environment comes from a lack of constraint on the growth of population. There is no single right number of people that we can have as a goal: the number varies with our way of life on the planet and the state of its health. . . .
Personally I think we would be wise to aim at a stabilized population of about half to one billion, and then we would be free to live in many different ways without harming Gaia.71
Whenever someone urges a dramatic reduction in human population, others worry or expect that draconian means to achieve the envisioned reductions will follow. Lovelock thinks people may already be moving voluntarily in the right direction, but warns, “In the end, as always, Gaia will do the culling and eliminate those that break her rules.” Then he expresses doubts that democracies “with their noisy media and special-interest lobbies” will act fast enough. Here, he is arguing that if we continue to exceed the planet’s carrying capacity, Gaia will eventually and necessarily take her revenge.72
Those who encounter Lovelock’s critiques of humanism and sustainable development, and assertions that some reduction in currently enjoyed freedoms may be needed to heal Gaia, conclude that he is espousing ecofascism. Some philosophers would add that this is unsurprising, for the violation of individual rights is the bedfellow of ethical holism. In 2007 I heard from colleagues who listened to Lovelock’s inaugural lecture as the first holder of the Arne Naess Chair at the University of Oslo. One of them was disturbed by what he took to be Lovelock’s antihumanistic views, citing Lovelock’s belief that a large proportion of the human population was likely to die during the twenty-first century because of climate change and the limited aid that affluent countries would be able to render.
Lovelock would likely rejoinder that such criticisms are based on the kind of anthropocentric humanism that precipitated the environmental crisis in the first place. Moreover, he thinks that a proper scientific understanding of the human place in nature demonstrates that the supposed opposition between the needs of humanity and the well-being of nature is patently false. In a passage defending the deep ecologists who have faced similar criticisms, he wrote, “Our task as individuals is to think of Gaia first. In no way does this make us inhuman or uncaring; our survival as a species is wholly dependent on Gaia and on our acceptance of her discipline.”73
In summary, Lovelock provides an example of both Gaian Naturalism and of how difficult it is for nature-loving scientists to speak personally about their respect for nature without using religious terminology (in a way reminiscent of how ethologists have difficulty speaking about the animals they study without using anthropomorphic language). In a concluding passage from an essay titled “Gaian Pilgrimage,” Lovelock expressed his feeling of belonging to and reverence for the biosphere:
Four billion years of evolution have given us a planet unsurpassed in beauty. We are a part of it and through our eyes Gaia has for the first time seen how beautiful she is. We have justified our ancient feeling for the Earth as an organism and should revere it again, and what better way to do it than by a pilgrimage. Gaia has been the guardian of life for all of its existence; we reject her care at our peril. . . . If you put trust in Gaia, it can be a commitment as strong and as joyful as that of a good marriage, one where the partners put their trust in one another and since they are, as Gaia is, mortal, their trust is made even more precious.74
The fusion of Gaia as worthy of reverence and trust with a naturalistic acknowledgment of her mortality may not fit easily into traditional definitions of religion, which often require belief in immortal divine beings. This melding, however, is a wonderful example of Gaian Naturalism. One need not believe in nonmaterial divine beings to have religion, for there are no better roots for the word than the ancient ones having to do with being tied fast or connected. The felt sense of dependence, connection, and belonging to nature that Lovelock expresses is also commonly felt and articulated by multitudes of environmentalists, conventionally religious and not. Combined with Lovelock’s environmental advocacy, it is clear that he provides a good example of a kind of dark green religion.
My objective in this chapter has been to examine dark green religion within the environmentalist milieu through various lenses. The examples illuminate the types of dark green religion I identify—Spiritual Animism, Naturalistic Animism, Gaian Spirituality, and Gaian Naturalism—while also demonstrating that the boundaries between them are complicated and fluid. Yet the general impulse to perceive nature as sacred, valuable as a whole as well as in its parts, but also imperiled and in need of reverent care, has been found throughout.
My expectation is that the trope dark green religion, and the fourfold typology involving naturalistic and supernaturalistic Animism and Gaian Religion, will have explanatory and interpretive power. If so, then readers acquainted with environmental literature, movements, and politics should be able to readily think of their own examples of people, movements, and practices that fit one or more of the types.
My experience has been that working through terms such as religion, spirituality, nature religion, green religion—and coming to understand what appear to be different but sometimes overlapping types of dark green religion—can clarify how we understand a host of complicated social phenomena. In the subsequent chapters I do not belabor this schema, tediously noting every time something akin to an animistic perception, Gaian worldview, or a dark green idea is expressed. Instead I explore the roots, sometimes surprising manifestations, and growing influence of contemporary nature spirituality.
