In this chapter I borrow the term parareligion from the anthropologist Jonathan Benthall as shorthand for what some call implicit religion or quasi religion. Some use such terms to refer to religion-resembling phenomena that they do not consider to actually be religious. I am using the term parareligion, however, without assuming it needs some currently missing trait to be “real” religion. Instead, I use it in a way that reflects this study’s flexible definitional strategy, which does not seek to resolve religion’s boundaries.1
Gaian Naturalism and Naturalistic Animism, and thus much of the phenomena already examined, are examples of the kind of naturalistic dark green religion that could be considered parareligion. The scientists quoted by David Suzuki, discussed in the previous chapter, who express “awe and reverence before the universe,” who urge people to consider the earth as sacred and environmental protection a religious duty, provide one example; so do many of the others Suzuki drew upon, including Leopold, Carson, Odum, Soulé, Wilson, Kellert, and Lovelock. To further reinforce affective connections with nonhuman organisms, Suzuki also included in his Sacred Balance the final passage from Darwin’s Origin of Species regarding the grandeur of an evolutionary world-view. Then Suzuki added this passage from Albert Einstein (1879–1955): “A human being is part of the whole, called by us the universe. . . . He experiences himself . . . as something separate from the rest, [which is] a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures.”2
Passages like these echo themes typical of dark green religion. They represent the impulse to use poetic if not religious terminology to express perceptions and feelings most meaningful to their authors.3 Of special note is a 1986 statement by the well-known biologist Paul Ehrlich, again quoted by Suzuki: “I am convinced that a quasi-religious movement, one concerned with the need to change the values that now govern much of human activity, is essential to the persistence of our civilization.”4
Many are surprised to hear scientists promoting naturalistic nature religion or using religious terminology to express their respect for nature. This is less surprising when one knows something about Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919), who coined the word ecology.
Haeckel was a German zoologist and philosopher who, in 1866, developed a phylogenetic tree of life to illustrate his explicit assertion that “man has evolved from apes just as these have evolved from lower animals.” This was, as Richard Noll put it, “an explosive admission that Darwin deliberately avoided in On the Origin of Species.” Haeckel also fused a Darwinian worldview with a pantheistic philosophy, which helps account for why he became a very popular scientific author, “rivaled, perhaps, only by recent scientists such as Carl Sagan and E. O. Wilson.” Haeckel hoped for nothing less, Noll wrote, than the spread of “an explicitly pantheistic and atheistic ‘Monistic Religion’ based on ‘the good, the true, and the beautiful’ in Nature [that] would replace Christianity [and in which] Nature itself would be worshipped through a new aesthetic vision in science . . . as reflected through the prismatic truth of evolution.”5
Haeckel’s nature spirituality would be taken in both naturalistic and overtly spiritual ways: Einstein was reportedly an admirer, as was Rudolf Steiner (1865–1925). Einstein had affinity with the naturalistic pole of dark green religion. Steiner, the German theosophist, had more affinity with the spiritual pole. Steiner sought esoteric truths in nature and encouraged others to do so as well. Through the philosophy he developed called anthroposophy, the invention of biodynamic farming, and the Waldorf schools he inspired, he contributed substantially to sustainability movements and green politics in Europe and beyond.6 Steiner significantly influenced the Australian Bill Mollison (b. 1928), who pioneered permaculture, a self-sustaining form of organic farming that has been spreading for decades, especially within the countercultural branches of the global environmentalist milieu.7 These countercultural streams, while scientific in some ways, have also involved beliefs that nonmaterial energies or spirits animate life-forms, which need to be worked with respectfully, including through rituals, when gaining sustenance from the earth. This stream is a form of Gaian and/or animistic spirituality, and it has influenced some in bioregional and sustainability movements.8
The naturalistic pole of dark green religion has more affinity with conservation biology. According to Stephen Humphrey, one of the founders of the Society for Conservation Biology (in 1986), the discipline is animated by biophilia and a mission to apply ecological knowledge to conserve biodiversity.9 Three of the discipline’s architects—David Ehrenfeld, Michael Soulé, and Reed Noss—have been staunch critics of anthropocentric and humanistic philosophies.10 Ehrenfeld, for example, who was appointed the first editor of Conservation Biology (in 1987), published The Arrogance of Humanism in 1978, which remains a landmark in nonanthropocentric environmentalism. Drawing on religion-tinged language to make his point, he elegantly expressed melancholy over the extinction crisis: “We must live in our century and wait, enduring somehow the unavoidable sadness . . . nothing is free of the taint of our arrogance. We have defiled everything, much of it forever, even the farthest jungles of the Amazon and the air above the mountains, even the everlasting sea which gave us birth.”11
For his part, Soulé, a Buddhist who took a multiyear sabbatical from academia to study and meditate, organized a 1981 conference in Los Angeles to explore the relationships between religion and ecology. He invited Arne Naess to speak, which spurred a long and close friendship in which Naess became “a major influence” in his life, Soulé recalled later. He subsequently invited Naess to give the keynote address at the second conservation biology conference, “because he provided a better philosophical foundation for conservation and biodiversity than anybody since Leopold.”12 Noss, who became the second editor of Conservation Biology, had also been attracted to radical environmentalism in the early 1980s, while a graduate student, but left the movement by the end of the decade, frustrated by the hostility to science that he found among many involved. Yet as he rose to prominence in the scientific world, he continued to promote deep ecology and biodiversity protection.13
Science-grounded parareligious phenomena are not always welcomed, and they can be confusing. They can be confusing because it is unclear what terms like quasi religion and sacred mean. Neither Ehrlich nor the scientists quoted by Suzuki defined these terms. Most people do understand that the word sacred, as vague as it is, has something to do with what people consider holy or of ultimate value. But Richard Dawkins, who in the early twenty-first century became one of the world’s leading scientific atheists, would like those who do not believe in nonmaterial divine beings to stop using religious terminology, even for worthy environmental goals.
In The God Delusion, Dawkins sought to debunk the possibility explored throughout Dark Green Religion that nature-inspired wonder, delight, and awe might be considered religious. Such religion-tinged respect for nature has become so common, however, that Dawkins was compelled to address it before launching his assault on religion. He began his book, therefore, with an epigraph from Einstein: “I don’t try to imagine a personal God; it suffices to stand in awe at the structure of the world, in so far as it allows our inadequate senses to appreciate it.”14 Dawkins then acknowledged “a quasi-mystical response to nature and the universe is common among scientists and rationalists.” He continued, however, that such a response “has no connection with supernatural belief.”15 Instead, he offered Darwin’s comforting conclusion that there is “grandeur in this [evolutionary] view of life,” and followed this with a parallel thought expressed in Pale Blue Dot, by the astronomer Carl Sagan: “How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, ‘This is better than we thought! The universe is much bigger than our prophets said, grander, more subtle, more elegant.’ . . . Instead they say, ‘no, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.’ A religion, old or new, that stressed that magnificence of the Universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths.”16 Dawkins did not quote Sagan’s next sentence, “Sooner or later, such a religion will emerge,” presumably because he found the idea distasteful. But he did accurately note that “all Sagan’s books touch the nerve-endings of transcendent wonder that religion monopolized in past centuries.” Then, Dawkins revealed, “My own books have the same aspiration.”17
Despite this aspiration, Dawkins strongly objected to such wonder being referred to in religious terms and to, what he called, the “failure to distinguish what can be called Einsteinian religion from supernatural religion.” He then criticized the cell biologist Ursula Goodenough, who had called herself a “religious naturalist” and wrote a book titled The Sacred Depths of Nature, for hiding her atheism behind religious language. Dawkins contended that it is “destructively misleading” when scientists label as religious their aesthetic and affective experiences when contemplating nature because “for the vast majority of people, ‘religion’ implies ‘supernatural.’ ” Dawkins even declared that it is “intellectual high treason” when atheists and others who do not really believe in the “interventionist, miracle wreaking . . . prayer-answering God” confuse people with pantheistic or other religious language.18
This critique was likely disheartening to those in the World Pantheist Movement, nontheistic naturalists who are an excellent example of Gaian Naturalism. Originally named the Society for Scientific Pantheism (in 2006), the group’s website quoted a famous statement attributed to Einstein: “A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty—it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude; in this sense, and this alone, I am a deeply religious man.” Then the site asked its visitors:
Is Nature your spiritual home? Do you feel a deep sense of peace and belonging and wonder in the midst of nature, in a forest, by the ocean, or on a mountaintop? Are you speechless with awe when you look up at the sky on a clear moonless night and see the Milky Way strewn with stars as thick as sand on a beach? . . . Do you find it impossible to believe in supernatural beings, and difficult to conceive of anything more worthy of reverence than the beauty of nature or the power of the universe? If you answered yes to these questions, then you will feel thoroughly at home in the World Pantheist Movement. Our caring and celebratory approach focuses on nature rather than the supernatural, on what we can see and do and live out rather than on invisible entities that we can only imagine.
The next section argued that the group’s “naturalistic reverence for nature” satisfies the human need for meaning “without sacrificing logic or respect for evidence and science.” The site also listed as “honorary members” a number of individuals who are good exemplars of Gaian Naturalism, including Lovelock, Suzuki, Sagan, and Goodenough.19
There are many difficulties in Dawkins’s hard line against mixing religious terminology with nontheistic nature appreciation. Foremost may be that he must labor to show that those he otherwise appreciates—but who blur the boundaries between science and religion through symbolic and metaphorical writing—are not really religious (as he understands religion, of course). He did this with Einstein by quoting additional passages from him:
I am a deeply religious nonbeliever. This is somewhat a new kind of religion. . . .
I do not believe in a personal God. . . . If something is in me which can be called religious then it is the unbounded admiration for the structure of the world so far as our science can reveal it. . . .
I have never imputed to Nature a purpose or a goal, or anything that could be understood as anthropomorphic. What I see in Nature is a magnificent structure that we can comprehend only very imperfectly, and that must fill a thinking person with a feeling of humility. This is a genuinely religious feeling that has nothing to do with mysticism.20
What Dawkins does not adequately explain is why nontheists draw on religious terminology to express their most heartfelt perceptions and feelings about the world and why they care for it. Part of the answer is that humans are social beings, and religious communities can create and powerfully reinforce social mores. Suzuki hinted at this in The Sacred Balance when he spoke of the joys of working in communities to protect and restore nature, and he described such activities as religious.21
The World Pantheists provided another example of dark green religion promoting collective ethical action as they urged website visitors to unite, endorse the Earth Charter, and campaign against social injustice and global warming. These sorts of expressions reveal the impulse to institutionalize dark green religious feeling and to influence public policies and social structures. The Earth Charter is one example of several institutional initiatives inspired, in part, by participants in dark green religion. Before discussing the charter and other international developments, which illuminate further the influence of dark green religion, additional means by which dark green religion is expressed and promoted deserve attention.
Long before motion pictures and documentaries, dark green religion was expressed and promoted through writings in science, philosophy, fiction, and poetry. Nature writing is more familiar than most of the phenomena I examine under the dark green religion microscope. I have found no better summary of the perceptions and feelings at the root of most nature writing than an essay by Joseph Wood Krutch, first published in 1950 in the Saturday Review, and then as an introduction to his collection, Great American Nature Writing.22
Krutch began by observing that “the legend of a golden age when man lived in harmony with nature seems to be almost as old as civilization itself” and that there is “a vast body of scholarly writings devoted to the analysis of what is loosely called ‘the appreciation of nature’ as a literary phenomenon.” Then, after acknowledging that Darwin and Thoreau were both influenced by many others before them, he noted:
If it is true not only that Thoreau was the most original of the modern nature writers, but also that nearly everyone who has come after has learned something from him, then it ought to be possible to put one’s finger upon some aspect of his uniqueness. Perhaps no man before him had ever taken quite so literally the term ‘fellow creatures’ and perhaps that is one of the most significant things about him. When he spoke of having ‘a little fishy friend in the pond,’ when he held interviews with a woodchuck or hoped that one of his games had taught the fox something, he was expressing in his own special humorous way a sense of intimacy and of fellowship to some degree novel. . . . Thoreau could feel as he did, not so much because he was tender toward inferior creatures as because he did not think of them as inferior: because he had none of that sense of superiority or even separateness which is the inevitable result of any philosophy or any religion which attributes to a man a qualitative uniqueness and therefore, inevitably, suggests that all other living things exist for him.23
In this, Krutch not only recognized Thoreau’s unique perspective, he saw the animistic dimension to Thoreau’s own and much subsequent nature writing.24 Like Leopold, who died shortly before Krutch wrote this essay, and like historian Lynn White’s critique seventeen years after this essay, Krutch blamed Christianity for the prevailing anthropocentric attitude that “refuses to admit” that humankind was descended from apes and “continuous with the rest of nature.” After discussing figures, including Darwin’s own grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, who cleared the way for Darwin’s revolutionary theory, Krutch concluded that Thoreau’s basic feeling of oneness with nature and kinship with her creatures had affinity with the ancient idea of “the world soul or, if one prefers . . . the Great God Pan.” Moreover:
Much ‘nature writing’ today reflects more or less definitely this sense of identity, material as well as spiritual, with the fellow creatures which it studies and describes. It implies if it does not state a kind of pantheism in which the symbol of the unity of all living things is not an elusive spirit but a definable material thing. Yet this definable material thing is also a symbol and being such does not necessarily imply any thoroughgoing materialistic philosophy. It implies merely that Life itself rather than something still more mysterious called the ‘cause of life’ is the bond between fellow creatures.25
Thus, as one of the earliest “ecocritics,” Krutch perceived the heart of the nature-writing genre: animistic and Gaian connections with nature. He saw this clearly, I think, because of his affinity for such spiritualities, which he expressed a few years later in The Voice of the Desert. There he wrote of listening to the earth’s many landscapes but especially the desert, describing how it evokes a deep sense of belonging, humility, and awe. He concluded by referencing the eighteenth-century distinction between the beautiful and the sublime: “The sublime . . . inspires awe . . . and [is] powerful; it carries with it the suggestion that it might overwhelm us if it would. By these definitions there is no doubt which [sublime rather than merely beautiful] is the right word for the desert.” For Krutch, nature and especially the desert were sacred, a theme Edward Abbey would embellish in Desert Solitaire.26
Krutch, like many contemporary scholars of nature writing, and most of the nature writers past and present, was engaged in the production of what I am calling dark green religion. Dark green themes also increasingly appear in nature-focused magazines, including Orion, and in widely distributed publications such as National Geographic and Outside. These are some of the surprising sources of dark green spirituality. Other tributaries appear in the borderlands between New Age, pagan, and environmentalist enclaves.
There is an “ecotopian” genre, for example, that imagines paths to and the elements of human societies that find their ways back to harmony with a sacred Mother Earth. Ernest Callenbach inaugurated this genre when he published Ecotopia in 1975.27 The writings of the pagan-witch Starhawk provide another example. Born of Jewish heritage and named Miriam Simos in 1951, she later changed her name to fit her new religious identity. As Starhawk she became well known in religious and political countercultures for her effort to revive Paganism in general and Wicca (sometimes called Witchcraft or the Craft) in particular. Starhawk believed these traditions originated in the pre-Abrahamic nature religions of Europe, making her argument in her widely read Spiral Dance in 1979.28 In 1980 “she and her coven-sisters founded Reclaiming, a center for feminist spirituality and a school of Witchcraft,” and she eventually also became an important activist in the antiglobalization movement.29 She also wrote popular novels in Callenbach’s ecotopian tradition, but even more so than Callenbach expressed in them dark green, even radical environmental themes.30
The very same day in 1979 that Starhawk published The Spiral Dance, Margot Adler, a National Public Radio reporter in the United States, published another influential book about the growth and types of earth-revering Paganism.31 Both Adler and Starhawk managed to turn contemporary Paganism in an environmentalist direction. This was no small accomplishment, for there are aspects to Paganism, including its hedonistic ethos and the tendency to emphasize ritualizing as a means to ecstatic experience, that hinder political activism.
Pagan themes, however, are increasingly found in popular culture, even if they are not recognized as such. The African American writer Alice Walker, for example, won the Pulitzer Prize for her 1982 book, The Color Purple, which Steven Spielberg turned into a motion picture in 1985 that was nominated for eleven Academy awards.32 The setting was the rural southern United States in the early twentieth century, and although most of the attention was focused on the violence toward its black women characters or on its lesbian themes, a key part of the book and film was about how the oppressed women found healing. They did so by rejecting patriarchal Abrahamic religion, embracing each other, and coming to an understanding that they belong to a sacred and beneficent Mother Earth.
In her book Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism, Walker later reflected on this work and her religious sentiments. She explained how one character learned from the other that “God is everything that is, ever was or will be.” She then confided, “In day-to-day life, I worship the Earth as God—representing everything—and Nature as its spirit.”33
Walker was influenced by early ecofeminist scholarship and by views that understand Native Americans as having deep reverence for Mother Earth: “If our awareness is beginning to change, it is thanks in part to feminism and feminist scholarship, and to a resurgent belief in the sacredness of the feminine, which was deliberately erased, demonized, and disparaged in all major religions. But thanks also to indigenous peoples who . . . have risen up to speak in defense of the ancient Goddess/God of all pagans and heathens, Mother Earth.” Speaking especially to those of African descent, Walker urged a return to pagan, ancestral traditions: “It is fatal to love a God who does not love you. A God specifically created to . . . enlarge the tribal borders of someone else. We have been beggars at the table of a religion that sanctioned our destruction. Our own religions denied, forgotten; our own ancestral connections to All Creation something of which we are ashamed. I maintain that we are empty, lonely, without our pagan-heathen ancestors; that we must lively them up within ourselves, and begin to see them as whole and necessary and correct.”34
Walker also has written of animistic experiences, such as communion with a horse (including through eye-to-eye contact), learning lessons from animals, and having dialogues with trees and the earth itself in which they describe what it feels like be so oppressed by humans (in a way reminiscent of the Council of All Beings).35 Elsewhere, Walker has described her trust in the universe, which reflects a common understanding of religion: that it has to do with trusting powers greater than oneself.36 Within a spiritual framing she calls pagan, Walker thus provides another example of dark green religion—but more on the naturalistic than the spiritual side of the continuum. Some Pagans are entirely naturalistic in their worldviews and do not believe literally in goddesses or nature spirits but rather consider these to be symbolic expressions of human connections to nature. Despite her regular use of goddess imagery and other religious terminology, in 1989 Walker told Oprah Winfrey (who played one of the main characters in the film version of The Color Purple): “There is no heaven. This is it. We’re already in heaven, you know, and so . . . for the earth to survive, we have to acknowledge each other as part of the . . . same family.”37
Starhawk, Adler, and Walker show that Paganism, by emphasizing Mother Earth as sacred and sometimes equating her with the body of the goddess, is fertile ground for environmentalism. Both Walker and Starhawk, who live in Northern California, have supported campaigns against logging in the redwood biome. Given the earthly ground of contemporary Paganism, it is unsurprising that when Paganism does lead to political action it would have a strong ecofeminist dimension. But many would be surprised to find environmental action promoted in New Age enclaves. There has been, however, at least a modest greening of New Age spirituality, and some of this is dark green and politically engaged.
New Age religion deserves its reputation for otherworldliness and political indifference. This is in part because it views consciousness change as the prerequisite to the desired harmony between the earthly and heavenly dimensions of the universe. Yet some New Age thinkers view environmental protection and restoration as critically important to the emerging age of peace and harmony.38
The bestselling novels by James Redfield, which center around an ancient, recently discovered Mayan document said to contain the Celestine Prophecy, provide a striking example.39 The prophecy provides the keys to uniting earth and heaven and explains the path to a prosperous and peaceful future. This path includes, on the one hand, human lovemaking, which “opens up a portal from the afterlife to the Earthly dimension [and] is a holy moment in which a part of Heaven flows into the Earth.” But equally important is the protection of cultural and biological diversity: cultural diversity because the prophesy comes from indigenous peoples whose teachings show the way to the New Age; biological diversity because intact, biologically diverse wilderness areas are the “sacred portals” between the afterlife and earthly experience. To create harmony in the universe, therefore, between earthly and otherworldly dimensions, humans must protect and restore the world’s “majestic, cathedral forests.”40 As in most dark green religion, Christianity is also seen as an obstacle to the envisioned harmony, and in Redfield’s stories the prophesy must be protected from Catholic and governmental agents who do not want its secrets revealed.
Some who resonate with dark green religion would charge that in Redfield’s novels nature is not intrinsically valuable but is rather a means to human spiritual ends. Redfield would likely view such complaints as typical of the dualistic, polarizing thinking that, if the planet is to be healed, must be overcome with positive, conscious energy. He might well also quote one of his characters to the effect that a spiritual approach, producing human consciousness change, is the way to save the planet’s biota: “Once we reach the critical mass . . . and the insights begin to come in on a global scale . . . we’ll grasp how beautiful and spiritual the natural world really is. We’ll see trees and rivers and mountains as temples of great power to be held in reverence and awe. We’ll demand an end to any economic activity that threatens this treasure.”41 Then we’ll understand, Redfield explains through the character,
the natural areas of the Earth have to be nurtured and protected for the sources of the incredible power that they are. . . . As the human race evolves spiritually, we will voluntarily decrease the population to a point sustainable by the Earth. We will be committed to living within the natural energy systems of the planet. Farming will be automated . . . and . . . the trees necessary for construction will be grown in special, designated areas. This will free the remainder of the Earth’s trees to grow and age and finally mature into powerful forests. Eventually, theses forests will be the rule rather than the exception, and all human beings will live in close proximity to this kind of power.
Here Redfield’s Gaian and animistic spirituality is in plain view, and it exemplifies a New Age form of dark green religion. As ecological alarm grows, many in New Age subcultures continue to be preoccupied with unseen dimensions of the universe, but others, including Marianne Williamson, are grafting environmentalism onto their worldviews.42 As environmental concern intensifies, this new trend likely will as well. Moreover, as participants in New Age subcultures are drawn into the environmentalist milieu, the bricolage will continue. Significant numbers of those engaged in New Age enclaves already express dark green spirituality and these individuals, in turn, are influencing some environmentalists.43
I have already described the critical the role art has played in fostering perceptions of nature as sublime and intrinsically valuable, discussing literature, motion pictures and documentaries, and to a lesser extent poetry and photography, while pragmatically ignoring music.44 The importance of all of these arts in dark green religion cannot be underestimated. Like the literary examples just discussed, some of this can be surprising, for example, discovering the permanent exhibit of animistic and earth-revering Zimbabwean art located underground at the Atlanta airport, which included interviews with the artists who connected their love of nature with respect for their ancestors.45
The archetypal exemplar of photographic nature religion may be Ansel Adams (1902–1984), who became famous for his black-and-white landscapes (and many books reproducing them) focused especially on California’s Sierra Nevada.46 For Adams (like Muir), these mountains were his most sacred places. He expressed great affinity for Thoreau and the pantheistic poetry of Walt Whitman, and he became good friends with Robinson Jeffers, another important dark green poet. Adams considered himself a Pantheist and sought to evoke a perception of the sacred in nature. He viewed his art as the most important part of his environmental activism, which he engaged in largely through the Sierra Club after joining in 1919. He later served as a board member for many years, beginning in 1936.47 The leadership of the National Park Service, as well as millions of park visitors, have been moved by his photography.48 The U.S. Congress even named a wilderness (and mountain) in his honor, which is also where his ashes were scattered after his death.49
The creation of national parks was itself inspired in part by a longing to return to an Edenic paradise, and visual art (including photography) played a critical role in presenting the parks as sites of transcendent meaning.50 Indeed, many of the architects and interpreters in the Park Service have sought to evoke in visitors precisely such a sense of the sublime in nature. Focusing on Yosemite National Park, for example, Kerry Mitchell has scrutinized how the Park Service orchestrates the entire visitor experience: managing “viewscapes” to focus attention on the grandeur of the most spectacular cliffs and waterfalls: subtly suggesting what visitors should feel, presumably the sublime, through The Spirit of Yosemite, a documentary shown regularly at the park’s visitor center.51 The Park Service also permits the Ansel Adams Gallery in the park itself, on the floor of Yosemite Valley. The gallery features Adams’s photographs and photographic books and thus enables visitors to purchase objects that will remind them of their favorite sacred places upon their return to civilization.52
The strategic link between photography and other arts, and the protection of nature in national parks, is long-standing. This connection has been extended as national parks and other protected areas, such as biosphere reserves, have spread globally. Indeed, the connection between conservation, nature spirituality, and ethics is increasingly considered important when deciding how nature reserves are established, managed, and interpreted.53
Perhaps the most important general in the strategic deployment of photography as a conservation strategy was David Brower (1912–2000), a mountain climber credited with thirty-three first ascents in the Sierra Nevada, who was elected to the Sierra Club board in the early 1940s and became the club’s executive director in 1952.54 Brower is considered by many to be the most important environmental leader of the twentieth century, apart from John Muir himself. Many Sierra Club members, moreover, believe he was also the most authentic representative of Muir’s spirit among all of the club’s subsequent directors—in part because of his tenacity and also because of statements like, “To me, God and nature are synonymous.”55
Brower was also a long-time friend of Ansel Adams (they first met in 1933) who recognized the evocative and political power of the arts.56 Brower once remarked that he first heard the mountains speak through poets and only later, in a more direct way, through mountain music (the diverse sounds one hears in the wilderness as well as all of one’s sensory experiences of nature).57 Perhaps this is one reason why he could easily see the potential of a conservation strategy in Adams’s photography and in art in general. In the 1950s, therefore, Brower funded large exhibit-format photography books, usually spiced with poetry and prose, which together portray nature as pristine and sublime. Perhaps the two most famous of these were This Is the American Earth (1960) and The Place No One Knew (1963).58 The latter was a beautifully photographed lament over the construction of Glen Canyon Dam on the Colorado River, which drowned vast canyons behind it. Filled with prose that hit all of the major themes found in dark green religion, it included expressions of belonging to nature, kinship with other than human organisms, and (a naturalistic) Gaian religiosity well before James Lovelock resurrected Gaia.59 It was also a successful rallying cry against all large-scale dam projects, and the 2000 edition transformed the book from a eulogy for a lost canyon to a quest to restore it to its pre-dam grandeur.60 In 1965, with Adams as his coeditor, Brower and the Sierra Club also published Not Man Apart, which included photographs by Adams and many others and took its title from lines in “The Answer,” a Robinson Jeffers poem.61 This poem resonated with many who have affinity with dark green spirituality; indeed, it is one of the greatest examples of biocentric poetry in American letters. It reads in part:
Integrity is wholeness
the greatest beauty is
Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty
of the universe. Love that, not man
Apart from that, or else you will share man’s pitiful confusions
or drown in despair when his days darken.62
Beyond such fusing of poetry and photography into a new form of sacred text, Brower also pioneered green political advertising. Most famously, he and his comrades depicted a proposal for two dams on the Grand Canyon as a desecration akin to flooding the Sistine Chapel to get closer to its spectacular ceiling.63 The advertisement fell on fertile cultural soil and led to dramatic increases in Sierra Club memberships and political power.
A generation after these innovations, deep ecology activists gave this sort of mission strategy a new spin by preparing huge books juxtaposing photographs of intact forests with those devastated by clear-cut logging. The pictures were, as before, supplemented by words from scientists, activists, and poets who decried “industrial forestry,” argued that forests have intrinsic value, and urged a halt to such defiling acts. In what is probably the grandest example of such books as a conservation (if not also a religious) tool, copies of one such title were distributed to members of the U.S. Congress in the hope that they would see the light and halt logging on public lands.64
Such large-format photography books are now found in millions of homes worldwide—and their message is clear: the places least touched by humans and the most diverse biologically are the most sacred. Many of these books are also explicitly designed to evoke human sympathies for animals. An especially stunning one is Frans Lanting’s Eye to Eye: Intimate Encounters with the Animal World, with its photographs of animal eyes.65 In his introduction, Lanting explained how, as a youth in Holland, he read a novel by the Nobel Prize–winning Swedish author Selma Lagerlöf titled The Wonderful Adventures of Nils (1907).66 Lagerlöf told the story, Lanting explained, of “a boy who shrinks to the size of an elf” and then spent a year living with a family of geese “to see the world through their eyes”; but the child was saddened when he returned to his human size and his companions suddenly were afraid of him. Eventually, the geese asked the boy to become an advocate for them, and this inspired Lanting’s career as a naturalist and conservationist. Lanting continued, expressing a kind of Naturalistic Animism, “The conditions under which I work are often a far cry from Nils’s intimacy with his wild geese. [But there] were times when I shrank in size and learned to see the world through other eyes.” His book was designed, he said, “to celebrate the kinship of all life.”67
If one were to interview a host of wildlife photographers, the desire to connect with nonhuman organisms and the hope to promote felt kinship with them would be commonly expressed. With the right lenses, when observing many works of nature-focused art, dark green religion comes into focus.
In addition to the already discussed Disney Animal Kingdom Park and various national parks, interpretive displays with conservationist messages are found at many other venues—museums, aquariums, zoos, biosphere reserves, and the like. Some such exhibits have dark green themes. The National Museum of Anthropology in Mexico City, where I spent a full day in January 2008, provides an excellent example of how dark green religious themes are being presented powerfully to the public.
At the museum, the first permanent exhibit introduced the discipline of anthropology. Its most important panels were in both Spanish and English. These were among the most often read panels in the museum, their prominent placement and bilingual display signaling that the curators considered the information in them to be especially important. The first panel explained the age of the earth, the second described evolution and characterized it as a fact. The third panel included these words: “thus, anthropology, through the study of fossil remains and modern primates, can trace the evolutionary relationships, presenting a mirror that reminds us that we are part of the history of the world and the animal kingdom, and not as we had believed, that we were created to have nature at our service.” Note the dark green themes: belonging to nature, we are animals, and a rejection of Western religious cosmogony.
A large adjacent panel described the genus Australopithecus (an early bipedal hominid that scientists believe is a human ancestor). Together these panels expressed clear biocentric and kinship ethics; they also sought to overturn anthropocentric arrogance. The perceptive reader would recognize that (colonial) Abrahamic religions were being criticized for promoting precisely such destructive misperceptions, especially what the panels said was the false earlier view that nature was created only for humans. I was surprised to see all of this stated so forthrightly. Throughout the rest of the museum, other themes typical of dark green religion were expressed, including links between the domestication of plant and animal species, human overpopulation, deforestation, declining ecosystem diversity, declining resilience and agricultural productivity, famine, warfare, and environmental/social collapse. Moreover, although the museum displays forthrightly examined the close links between pre-Christian religions and violence (including human sacrifice), on the whole the connections between religion and nature in pre-Christian Mesoamerica were described in a positive way. Traditional ecological knowledge was explained and its interrelatedness with pagan, nature-related spirituality that yet survives in Mesoamerican indigenous communities was acknowledged and portrayed sympathetically. Also praised was the Paganism still present, in more fragmented form, within the now dominant forms of Christian religion. I concluded that this museum blended professional and up-to-date biocultural understandings, a measure of national pride, and a subtle anticolonial and antitheist attitude. The outcome was a celebration of the spiritual connections human beings once had with nature in Mesoamerica, still have in some measure, and could have again in a more robust way. It might not be going too far to suggest that the museum was a globalized and localized bricolage of dark green religion, in other words, it reflected ideas being developed by people around the world while illustrating them with examples from the region.
A few months after my day at the anthropology museum, I traveled to Puerto Williams, Chile, which is the world’s southernmost town and the capital of the country’s Antarctic province, an area that extends from the Darwin Cordillera at the Beagle Channel to the South Pole. The Beagle Channel was named for the ship Darwin sailed on his most famous voyage (he explored the area in 1832). I imagined that this remote town, in this stunningly beautiful and ecologically pristine place, resembled small coastal towns in Alaska or Norway a century earlier.
I was there in part because in 2005 UNESCO (the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization) approved a proposal to establish a Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve. I had an opportunity to discuss the reserve with scientists, philosophers, and others involved with the Omora Foundation and several universities, all of whom had been involved in the effort to establish the reserve or were there to consider the next steps for it.68 Several of them had long been involved in the research and interpretation at the Omora Ethnobotanical Park, a few kilometers from Puerto Williams, and they were led by the Chilean ecologist, conservation biologist, musical composer, philosopher, and professor (from the University of North Texas), Ricardo Rozzi.
After earning an master’s in ecology in his native Chile, Rozzi went on to earn a second master’s in environmental philosophy before adding a doctorate in ecology. This interdisciplinary background provided him with the intellectual range needed to integrate many dark green themes into his research, writing, and conservation efforts. He regularly speaks positively, for example, of the seminal thinkers and scientists that this volume explores, including Aldo Leopold and his leading interpreter, J. Baird Callicott; Rachel Carson; and Reed Noss. Rozzi explains the importance of traditional ecological knowledge and a corresponding concern for the conservation of both biological and cultural diversity; and he stresses both ecological interdependence and an evolutionary kinship ethics. The Rozzi-orchestrated Multi-ethnic Bird Guide illustrates these themes. It blends scientific and indigenous perspectives on the ecological systems and aviary life in South America, including human stories and bird sounds on two accompanying audio CDs. Rozzi took as examples the Yahgan and Mapuche, two distinct groups of indigenous people inhabiting the region:
The traditional ecological knowledge contained in the Yahgan and Mapuche ornithological narratives permits us to expand our ways of knowing about, and inhabiting, nature, and of living together with the birds and their ecosystems. . . . The indigenous narratives share two central notions with the contemporary, ecological-evolutionary perspective: 1) the sense of kinship between human beings and birds, derived from common genealogies or evolutionary histories, and 2) the sense of biotic communities or ecological networks, of which humans and birds form part.69
The next section, “Our Relatives, the Birds,” described how the eyes of birds and humans, and other evidence from modern biology, demonstrate that we share a common ancestor. It continued that this insight about birds and humans being relatives is reflected in long-standing Mapuche and Yahgan narratives, which often begin with the idea that “in ancestral times . . . birds were humans.” Rozzi then provided a picture of Ernst Haeckel’s tree of life in order to extend even more widely the kinship ethic. The caption said that the tree “illustrates the scientific-evolutionary theory of Charles Darwin, which proposes that human beings possess a common evolutionary origin shared with all living beings.” Rozzi subsequently concluded: “From the point of view of contemporary environmental ethics, the three cultural perspectives—Mapuche, Yahgan and scientific—emphasize the intrinsic value of avifauna because the birds are our distant evolutionary relatives. This implies that, to some degree, the existence of birds can be subject to moral considerations based on ontological and ethical judgments on par with those we use to judge the value of human life.” Rozzi also believes it is important to acknowledge that “human beings are not separate from nature”—and that the intrinsic value of all life and practical considerations regarding the prerequisites for human well-being lead to an ethics that respects and protects both cultural and biological diversity.70 The programs he and his collaborators are establishing at Omora Ethnobotanical Park and that are envisioned for the Cape Horn Biosphere Reserve are developing ways to express and teach such ethics and life practices.
During the dedication of the Omora Ethnobotanical Park, as a member of the Chilean and international socioecological research network, I saw officials involved with biosphere reserve programs from around the world, as well as Chilean politicians, military officers, scientists, philosophers, and community members, visit the park’s miniature forest-within-a-forest. The forest in this case consisted of scores of lichens, mosses, and liverworts endemic to the region, nestled within a lush forest ecosystem.71 These organisms were featured at stations with symbolic, large magnifying glasses (without glass), which directed attention to specific species and the adjacent names for them. The visitors also used real magnifying glasses to see these beautiful and bizarre life-forms. As I examined the lichens and the people examining them, I thought of the way the park’s interpreters had set up the viewing stations and mused about how ritual focuses attention on that which is considered sacred. These stations did precisely that. Guides and visitors expressed delight at what they were seeing, and the overall tone of the gathering was reverence for these diminutive life-forms.
After this ceremonial walk I spoke with Ximena Arango, an ecologist from Colombia and a member of the Omora Foundation’s research and educational team. For a number of years she had been studying, among other things, the region’s most charismatic woodpecker, while also developing interpretive programs for park visitors and local school children. When I asked her why she was living in this remote part of the world working on these projects, she said simply, “I just love the life.” Later, she communicated her own feelings of connection and belonging to nature, that this was something she had always felt, even as a youngster growing up in the large urban center of Bogota.72
Like many involved in efforts to preserve biological and cultural diversity, Rozzi and his colleagues were motivated by and engaged in what I have been calling dark green religion. As such they are participating in a long and rich spiritual tradition while also extending its reach. That reach is global, as evidenced by the substantial support for these sorts of efforts from international institutions, including the United Nations, as well as by Chilean governmental and educational institutions.
Probably the best known United Nations report addressing environmental sustainability (even famously defining the term sustainable development) was Our Common Future, which was issued by the World Commission on Environment and Development in 1987. Commonly known as the Brundtland Report—for the chairwoman of the commission, Gro Harlem Brundtland, then prime minister of Norway—the report was written in very measured tones. It nevertheless reflected some dark green themes, including an apocalyptic vision of environmental and social decline and the importance of protecting indigenous peoples and their spiritual traditions and ecological knowledge. Despite its dominant anthropocentric tone, it also made one of the earliest biocentric statements in an official UN document, recognizing a “moral obligation to other living beings.”73
The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization was founded in 1945 to help the international community develop standards and guidelines “to forge universal agreements on emerging ethical issues,” especially those having to do with the construction of environmentally sustainable, equitable, and peaceful societies.74 It has also been involved in promoting dark green religion. A year after the Brundtland Report, for example, UNESCO’s Man and the Biosphere Program—established in 1971 to administer a global network of biosphere reserves—published an oversized book that was described as a follow-up for a popular audience. Man Belongs to the Earth established its dark green tone not only with its title but by lauding Rachel Carson and Ernst Haeckel for their insights. Haeckel was praised as the man who “stressed the importance of the relation of the animal both to its organic as well as to its inorganic environment.” With Silent Spring, the foreword declared, Carson brought sudden “new awareness of the intricate relationships that link living organisms and their environment, of man’s oneness with nature and the extent of his influence over it.”75 Elsewhere in the book, the spirituality of belonging to nature was clear, as was the sense that without such perception it would be impossible to protect and restore the vitality of the earth’s ecosystems. The book declared that for man to restore the natural balance of the earth, “he must recognize his true position in the order of things and come to terms with the environment of which he is part.”76 Sprinkled through the book were passages from poets and philosophers, sages from various religious traditions, as well as scientists such as Carl Sagan, which reinforced the book’s promotion of perceptions of ecological interdependence and kinship toward nonhuman organisms, and of understandings of the preciousness (and precarious state) of the biosphere.77
Although the title of the book was said to be drawn from Chief Seattle (erroneously, as explained previously), the important thing for the current analysis is that these words expressed what the authors wished to say. The words also appeared inside the book, reinforcing the spirituality of belonging and the kinship ethics that have become increasingly common in the global environmentalist milieu.78 These words still resonate with people around the world. In 2005 I found excerpts from Chief Seattle’s famous speech on napkins in an Amsterdam bagel shop: “We know the sap which courses through the trees as we know the blood that courses through our veins. We are part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters. The bear, the deer, the great eagle, these are our brothers. The rocky crests, the dew in the meadow, the body heat of the pony, and man all belong to the same family.”
Four years after Man Belongs to the Earth was published, the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development was held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. Pressure had built on the UN such that it created a venue for a wide spectrum of civil society and began to create better lines of communication with nongovernmental actors. This summit provided many opportunities for dark green spirituality to be expressed, often in solidarity with the world’s indigenous peoples—who were, despite the organizers’ overtures to civil society, given almost no access themselves to the official meeting. Within the environmentalist milieu, however, indigenous peoples were recognized as critically important to the long-term health of the biosphere and its biodiversity, and they were acknowledged to be imperiled themselves. Representatives from the world’s largest religious traditions were also present, advocating strong reforms to protect the environment and the world’s most marginal people.
It was in the midst of the summit’s ferment that Maurice Strong, a Canadian who served as its general secretary, proposed the creation of an Earth Charter. The idea was to mimic the strategy behind the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights so that, after ratification, individuals, institutions, and nation-states would voluntarily improve their environmental performance or capitulate to pressure to do so. A prominent group of international figures, as well as representatives of civil society, were enlisted to draft and promote the charter. These figures included the former leader of the Soviet Union, Mikhail Gorbachev, who like Strong had affinity with dark green religion. Strong’s speeches, for example, have been laced with Gaia theory–inspired earthen spirituality and Gorbachev confessed in 1997 his own naturalistic form of earthen spirituality: “I believe in the cosmos . . . nature is my god. To me, nature is sacred. Trees are my temples and forests are my cathedrals.”79 Moreover, many of those involved in the charter’s drafting process had been profoundly influenced by Thomas Berry and his call to consecrate the scientific, evolutionary cosmogony and consider all of its diverse fruit sacred. It should not be surprising, therefore, that the initial draft of the Earth Charter, as well as the final version presented at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Johannesburg, South Africa, was the most impressive international example yet of dark green religion.80
Several things should by now be clear: dark green religion is an important part of environmentalist milieu; it is a global phenomenon with diverse manifestations in different cultures and social sectors; its participants wish to change the way we feel, think, and relate to the natural world; and they spread their faith in ways that sometimes involve ritual and religion-resembling practices. The activist impulse that flows from dark green religion is engaged at the local and regional levels, but as the movement spreads its ambitions have grown to include transformation of the multilateral and national institutions that shape human societies and determine their environmental impacts.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, as the truism says. So is whether one finds promise or peril in dark green religion. The dangers seem to fit into six broad categories.
Those so infused with a sense of kinship for nonhuman organisms and intense feelings of belonging to nature might venture too close to the wrong animal, or too deeply into an ecosystem about which they know too little, to prevent what would be a premature union with that animal or that ecosystem. I do not mean to be flippant, for there are examples: the philosopher who was nearly devoured by a crocodile; the crocodile hunter who succumbed to a stingray’s barb; and Timothy Treadwell, who loved and filmed grizzly bears, one of whom eventually killed and ate him and his girlfriend.81
The second danger encountered is rather different and grounded in the provocative accusation by Richard Dawkins that atheists who use religious terminology to describe their sense of natural awe and wonder are guilty of “high treason.” When I first read this charge, I realized that given my own definitional flexibility I might even stand so accused. So I was thankful I did not live in a country with an established atheist church . . . and a death penalty. Here, of course, I have intended to be flippant.
But in all seriousness, Dawkins would likely argue that I should not call “religious” or even analyze as “parareligion” the affective connections to nature that many people have. I hope my profession in chapter 1—that I am disinterested in patrolling the boundary between what some people count as religion and others do not—will be sufficient for most readers. Perhaps it would even satisfy Dawkins should he encounter this work. It is, of course, fine with me if Dawkins prefers to clearly state his own operational definition (which he does) and make his own arguments based on it. I am doing much the same. My definition of religion is more flexible for the simple strategic reason that it serves my interpretive purposes.
I do find Dawkins’s definitional fundamentalism ironic, however. As a social scientist, it strikes me as odd to deny people their own ways of describing themselves, or to say they should not use a term like sacred—when they try to express verbally what is most precious to them—unless they believe in nonmaterial divine beings. It seems to me that such rigidity hinders Dawkins from fully appreciating the extent to which “religion” might well be changing dramatically and decisively, and for the long term, in the wake of the cognitive revolution that Darwin precipitated. These changes, which have barely been under way for 150 years, in the main are those about which Dawkins would approve. Belief in a personal miracle-making God has been decisively on the wane in most advanced industrial countries, even in the United States, one of the most religious of the highly developed countries. Meanwhile, belief in God as an impersonal force, even a force of nature, is increasing.82 Such understandings Dawkins would not accept as constituting belief in God or religion. But by constraining his definition of religion in this way, real and significant worldview changes that are underway are opaque to him.
It is also ironic that Dawkins wishes to enforce his own orthodox atheism on other naturalists. In this, Dawkins’s own polemics resemble a trait all too common in religious traditions: sectarianism and strong mechanisms for worldview maintenance, including the shaming of wayward adherents. It seems much more reasonable, if rationality is the axial value, to expect Dawkins to wrestle more seriously with why colleagues who share his atheism nevertheless agree, in various ways, that humans should resacralize their perception of the universe and biosphere. Moreover, it is reasonable to expect Dawkins to explain why those he criticizes feel they can say such things, and use religious terminology, without sacrificing either their rationality or integrity. It is not clear, on Dawkins’s premises, that these people are as dangerous as the accusation of treason suggests.
The third of the perceived dangers is that dark green religion is spiritually dangerous, drawing people away from God and threatening their eternal fate. This danger is nearly the opposite of the second. A version of it would identify each type of dark green religion I have discussed as a form of Paganism whose devotees worship the creation rather than the creator. This is certainly a strong current in Abrahamic cultures that is well documented elsewhere.83 The negative reaction to dark green spirituality by those with such worldviews is understandable, given their beliefs. Conversely, participants in dark green religion are, with few exceptions, critical of if not hostile to the sorts of religions, and religious people, who would express these concerns. For the most part, despite occasional efforts to hybridize religious traditions, most of the world’s major religions have worldviews that are antithetical to and compete with the worldviews and ethics found in dark green religion.84
The fourth alleged danger, which is often rooted deeply in the perceived spiritual danger, is that dark green religion is fascistic and/or is part of a conspiracy to establish a totalitarian global government. We saw such criticism leveled previously at radical environmentalists. In this chapter, the most common target for such criticisms and fears would be the United Nations. Efforts to create an Earth Charter as a means to promote and enforce strong international environmental treaties feed directly into such fears—especially among those who highly value national sovereignty and worry about religious freedom.85 An Internet search on the United Nations or Earth Charter quickly reveals the depth of such fears as well as alarm about environmentalism in general.
The fifth perceived danger underlies a common attack on environmentalists in general: that they exaggerate environmental problems and thereby skew social priorities in ways that hurt human economies and the people who depend upon them. Critics may add that such alarmism leads to extremist and illegal tactics that exacerbate the already significant negative impacts that follow from the alarmism alone. It is easy to find examples of such charges, including against David Suzuki, Ted Turner, and many others described in this volume as participants in dark green religion.86
The third, fourth, and fifth dangers are thus spiritual, political, and economic, respectively. They are generally voiced from the political right. The sixth danger is perceived by those who lean both politically right and left, both religiously conservative and liberal, as well as by some atheistic humanists. This fear is that those who promote kinship ethics or the intrinsic value of nature devalue human beings and ignore what should properly be accorded greater moral priority, namely, human life.87 Like the disconnect between those from the mainstream world religions and those involved in dark green religion, the differences here may be intractable. Those with anthropocentric values tend to fear that biocentric values produce indifference to human suffering, and those with biocentric values tend to believe that anthropocentric values lead to indifference to the well-being of the rest of the community of life. The evidence points both ways.
The best way to evaluate these fears may not be through philosophical debate, as important as that may be. The best way may well be to study those producing and expressing these competing value systems and to assess their near-term influence and project their long-term impacts. This approach may be the most judicious way to evaluate whether dark green religion should be embraced or feared.